Mitch Joel wrote a great blog post yesterday entitled “Welcome To The Sixty Second News Cycle - Death To The 24 Hour News Cycle.” His basic premise is that there the flow of information from sources like blogs, Twitter and other online channels is increasing rapidly and mingling with more traditional sources of news to create a pretty-close-to-real-time updated flow of facts that anyone with the means can tap into, pretty much at will.
I strongly agree with Mitch’s points, and I also think there is a ying to the yang of which he speaks. While new Internet sources help provide an amazing snapshot on the state of our world is at any given moment, they also help provide an unprecedented ability to contextual the events of the moment within a broader picture.
In seeing and hearing coverage of the recent conflict on the Gaza Strip, I felt I needed a refresher on the nature and history of the region to help better understand what is happening there. Enter social media, like Wikipedia’s entry on the Gaza Strip, with historical information going back to the 1500s intermingled with very current information, entered and moderated by a community of interest. Enter also traditional media outlets like the CBC News In Depth section on the conflict, with links to stories starting in mid-2007 that help give a more recent historical perspective on the situation today.
The Internet provides for immediacy, but it also provides for near-limitless access to history. I believe within the range of up-to-the-second fact provision and deep, built-up-over-years information, there is a place for many online and offline media types and business models. The great opportunity for media producers, both new and traditional, will be in understanding where they fall on this continuum. If you’re not the one providing the up-to-the-second information, how are you providing value for your audience?
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