TechWag

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I don’t think that anyone really wanted traditional media to fail over the Iranian elections, but while all of us social networking types were living in a 24X7 constant twitter/FriendFeed stream over the weekend while we watched the elections, and monitored a potential revolution in Iran via social networking, we could not help but notice that the traditional media didn’t really pick anything up until Sunday.

By Sunday the revolution had moved to twitter, facebook and FriendFeed with a continuing stream of good news, potentially deceptive news and rumor, pictures, video, and notice of network clampdowns or traffic drop offs to those systems from the Iranian network. Social networking types were already all over the story, some of it true, some of it rumor, some of it conjecture. Why traditional media didn’t really pick up the story until Sunday only they will know, in the mean time, social networking had digested the story into the background by Sunday with occasional spikes throughout the week as things happen in Iran.

In case people don’t get it, Iran is strategically important, both as a source of political turmoil and as a potential nuclear power. They matter, they matter a lot, and what happens in Iran can have serious consequences at home, here in the USA. It matters who they elect, it matters if there is election fraud, and it matters if Iran is blocking the internet, or cutting off the internet and access to the revolution that is being broadcast by social media. Louis Gray though brings up the core of the point, it is not that we wanted traditional media to fail, if anything we were hyper aware of the failings of traditional media as it failed to report, report something that was of vital interest to the world, the Iranian elections, and its aftermath.

< So help me understand… Many of us are flat-out refusing to be consumers of the world’s news media, from newspapers like the New York Times and news channels like CNN, chewing away at their ad revenue. Some exult in the bad news as it streams forth – as newspapers close and journalists are sent packing. Others revel when old media makes stupid mistakes in the new world, like the AP demanding you not excerpt their stories, or other sites threatening to sue when linked to. But when a real newsworthy event hits, we hold them accountable for not being there, first to respond. Source: Louis Gray

First person reports from the street were being streamed by just about every device in existence that could tie into the systems that feed the continuing twitter/facebook/FriendFeed streams. There was no failure to get the word out. BBC acquitted itself admirably, as could be expected, the CS Monitor also did ok, but the main channels, where the majority of Americans do get their news, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox, ABC really didn’t pick up the story until 48 hours after everything started going to Hades in a hand basket. That is more of a failing of the news, the ability to report based on social media (which can not be authenticated, although they could have leveraged the BBC and the CS Monitor, Al Jarezza, and a host of other sites with reporters in country) to get news into people’s hands. By Friday night, it was obvious the only news worth following was happening on the social media channels. Traditional news had passed it by, failed to report, failed to inform, and failed in general to understand the importance of what is/was happening half a world away.

While I wish that traditional news had been there, the revolution was twittered, while the traditional news systems failed. Social Networking is the news channel, we filter based on the sources we know and trust, we build our opinions and we form our support. When traditional news comes along much later, it is too late, people who follow social networking as news already have their picture formed, and very little will change that, especially when the news is reported late.