Amazing how quickly Twitter replaced blogs as the source for breaking news. Seems much quicker than the move from newspapers to blogs.
This started as a message I posted on Twitter, but I thought it was interesting enough to expand a bit here.
I work in digital media and among the things we do really well is quickly aggregate news from across the Internet. It struck me as odd this morning when I got up and checked our news feed and noticed that two of our most recent items were sourced from Twitter. One of the Twitter users was a sports agent, the other a television reporter. We aggregate hundreds of stories a day and I’d be willing to be that a month ago, we’d never used Twitter as a source. Now, we do it routinely. Of course we post our feeds to Twitter too, and I’m amazed at how often we’re re-tweeted.
When our business first began more than a decade ago we were scouring newspaper sites, watching television, and listening to the radio to uncover all of the stories that we wanted to cover. Of course, the problem with newspapers is that the news is already a day old once you read it. Still, we provided one-stop-shopping where people could quickly come and read summaries (and our analysis) of relevant sports stories from across the country.
A few years ago, blogs started to become a pretty common source for us. They were updated more frequently and often included the little details of transactions that were important to our niche, but might not be important enough to make it into the newspaper. The blogs gave us more sources, and more news, but required us to improve our own filtering so we could sort the important details from the noise.
Fast-forward to 2009 and now we’re moving to using Twitter to get the news as quickly as possible. However, it’s not just about speed. It’s about the content. Now blog writers are using Twitter to toss out quick thoughts that might not warrant a blog post. Again, we find ourselves digging valuable nuggets of information out of what is seemingly throw-away noise on Twitter.
Each of these new generations of content production has given us more news, more details about the news, and it’s done it more quickly. The trade-off is that with more news comes more noise, so we have to keep working harder to quickly discover what’s important without getting bogged down in the useless chatter.
It’s a good problem to have.
