There is interesting article in the Economist that gets it right (if you don’t count the lip service to the MSM). On the first night of the Iran revolution Twitter was superb and comprehensible, then it quickly disintegrated into unmanageable volume of repetitive low value messages. The old media had been reduced to the pathetic reporting about YouTube videos. And the clear winners are the blogs that can curate and filter the river of news. Economist – Twitter 1, CNN 0:
“Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.
Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English. The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.”
- Further Reading:
- Jealous about the Iran Revolution
- Christopher Hitchens: Iran – A Childlike Ward of the Black-Robed State
- New York Times to Charge for Web Content
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