Image via CrunchBaseRachel Sklar over at the Daily Beast has one of the more interesting stories of the day if you are interested in where media folks are going to go in 2009. The blurring of Blogs VS News papers will further deteriorate over 2009, where blogs are used for trial balloons to see how well the public, and the bloggers who are investigating reporting the news, can come up with stories. I would go further though because systems like Twitter are going to be used for real time or near real time transmission of world critical events, but this will all depend on whom you are following as well.

Blogs might be used for trial balloons for information that has yet to be completely investigated (She brings up the John Edwards affair that circulated around the blogosphere as one example of the trial balloon story. That and the desire not to have to link to the National Enquirer as the breaking source on the story, the editing department at the paper would never have let that fly, where most bloggers wouldn’t care, they would be more interested in the story and the traffic it would bring.

The key demarcation point though, not that bloggers will become investigative journalists, or that journalists will become bloggers, we have seen that already and it works. The role of real time or near real time reporting as shown by Twitter and its phenomenal reach into people’s lives as a way to break news. Most of the interesting breaking news happens on twitter first now. Those tweets are followed by hundreds or thousands of people and retweeted until just about everyone knows what is happening. Then the blogging starts once the information becomes more rounded, but smart bloggers know that if things are breaking on Twitter, it is going to be newsworthy if it is a disaster.

This is what is going to make 2009 more interesting than 2008 or even previous years, twitter has become embedded in normal people’s lives, much like SMS, the uptake and adoption has been very high over the last year.

Twitter has gone from 500K to 3.5 million visitors a month in the last year. Jaiku and Dopplr are floating under 100K people a month right now, meaning twitters reach is deeper and bigger when it comes to breaking news, and how people spread that news through systems like Friend Feed, Social Median, Facebook and other sites, everyone will link back to the tweets, or to blog entries that are talking about the late breaking news.

It is not so much then that the lines between journalist and blogger will be blurred, it will be more about 2009 being the year of twitter and how we consume and use those tweets to build out deeper stories of what is happening in the moment. It is almost taken for granted that media both big and small is going to change in 2009, but twitter will be the underlying drum beat that will determine the fast from the slow, and the newsworthy from the non newsworthy.