Tech Town, NC

It has been argued by many in the digerati that Twitter is the new worldwide, omniscient, democratic news authority. It’s the AP, CNN, and NY Times rolled into one, minus the biased filters. It’s information nirvana, and that spells doom for the aforementioned Main Stream Media.

Wrong.

The US Airways flight 1549 story is a perfect demonstration of why Twitter and the MSM work in harmony, and make each other better.

The TwitPic heard round the world, from the phone of Janis Krums is here. Take a look at the picture. Take a look at the tweet. Amazing right? Now tell me what happened.

Not so simple is it? Clearly, the picture tells a story, but not the whole story. That gets filled in here, here, and in a most engaging way here. I first heard about the crash on twitter, but about a second later a coworker shouted at me “A plane just crashed in the Hudson! It’s all over CNN.” When I asked what happened, my colleague was able to tell me they suspected birds took out the engines. From that point on I got almost all my information from the MSM. The only time Twitter came up after that was in the self-congratulatory sense in stories about Mr. Krums.

Twitter, Qik, FriendFeed, and other “Live” services are fantastic for providing firsthand, on the scene bits of information, but those bits need thoughtful investigation by human beings to be communicated in a meaningful way. Notice I didn’t say journalists, I said human beings. It doesn’t have to be a journalist, that’s not the important part. The important part is a thoughtful investigation. It just so happens that most of the time the people with the focus, practice, and resources to do that are journalists.

What Twitter makes apparent is that there is information out there, everywhere. That shouldn’t be a breakthrough discovery, but Twitter allows you to almost see the everyday dots and dashes that float in the ether. What happens next is up to those who gather the information. Not to get too philosophical, but in a way, Twitter is there to till the soil of everyday data, and journalists are there to harvest it and get it ready for consumption. For news junkies like me, that’s a very good thing.

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Lest you think I’m just an old media apologist, Matthew Ingram and Peter Kafka have posted similar thoughts. Lest you think they’re old media apologists, well, maybe sometimes…