Undercurrent

Iran is moving fast, the best source for breaking news right now is Twitter, but don’t forget to be a brilliant analyst at the same time!:

There’s plenty of misinformation out there, like rumors that Ahmadinejad is going to stage an assassination attempt, so we need to be careful about how we judge the information. If we’re a savvy analyst, we need to be careful about the weight we attach to photographs and video accounts. They’re the most immediate and emotionally powerful, but they can distort our understanding of the situation, particularly of about the importance of specific developments.

Every major news story these days has its own user-driven information logic, Iran is no exception. The realtime criticism of CNN’s coverage is a good example. Now we debate the news judgement of the media as it happens, and this opinion exchange again influences the news coverage and maybe even events. Some news media have been good at reflecting this shift via their news blogs, a format that turns out to be very useful:

NYT/The Lede

Guardian News Blog

HuffPo

(Thanks to Etterretninger for alerting me of the story — late, while doing other things!).

When your exclusive story can be quoted by all other media online seconds after you have published it, it no longer pays to invest in good journalism. Some say. Even government ministers. I have never understood that argument. If you consistently can produce good, exclusive, intriguing, appealing journalism, the audience will recognize it and reward you. A piece of evidence from Britain:

One of the most interesting aspects of the scandal is the revelation that old-fashioned scoops can still sell papers. Many publishers have assumed that in the Internet era, “exclusives” stay that way for about three seconds, so they are not worth pursuing. Instead, they have shifted the emphasis of their papers toward analysis or opinion. But The Telegraph’s exclusives, serialized like popular 19th century novels, have made a big difference at the newsstand. According to unaudited industry figures, The Daily Telegraph sold a cumulative total of about 900,000 additional copies in the first two weeks of its reports. On some days, its circulation jumped more than 10 percent from the official April level of about 818,000.

Tim Berners-Lee: Demand raw data. For science, but also for journalism.