11.26.02008 News no longer breaks -- it Tweets

Today’s Mumbai terror crisis represents more than a new chapter in global terrorism -- it is also opening a new chapter in global news. While CNN-IBN and other news outlets struggled to make sense of events, Twitter ran rings around their coverage, displaying tweets from citizens on the scene.

This news shift is as fundamental as what happened during the August 1991 Russian coup. Back then, the Russian government shut down telephone links, but it never occurred to the Generals to shut down the Internet. As a consequence, the world was able to follow events moment by moment via emails sent out from Moscow. For the first time, netizens were better informed than the news anchors.

This time the Tweeters are kilometers ahead of the reporters, and Tweets are just the tip of a citizen journalism tsunami. Flickr is filling up with photos posted moments after being taken, and there is already an authoritative Wikipedia page up and running -- and being updated in near real-time. I am certain that Google Earth will have a .dmg file open any moment.

Meanwhile, back in the world of old media, the breathless talking heads on CNN are chattering away like a bunch of stunned raccoons, telling the same hours-old stories and running the same hours-old clips again and again on-screen. Keep them up in a window if you can spare the screen space, but look elsewhere for the latest news -- and the best analysis.