The people who are still happy to wait for the morning paper will need a more informed analysis of what has happened, or they’ll continue to hear things from their friend who is using the internet/facebook/twitter.

I remember having a great chat with a research company as they outlined how a group of 6 new mothers interacted, and how the only one of them with broadband access was the focal point for questions and answers, because she had all the relevant information and was seen as the gatekeeper to all the knowledge…the others had TV and newspapers, but it didn’t serve the same function.

It’s about aggregation and then presenting that aggregation in the most appropriate way - for web users that may be incoming RSS feeds for 30 sources - for print readers it could be in a 1000 word article on page 2.

The difference is that by the time the paper comes out, most people will have heard about the news from the internet or from their friends.

For others, for certain topics they are happy to wait till they receive the morning paper or turn on network TV to get an edited, concise view of some event that occurred yesterday.

We make a major mistake if we think that everyone has the same needs. The essence of capitalism is figuring out how to meet those diverse needs profitably and consistently.

So, for some things — like being aware of the well-being of my family members who live in Los Angeles — Twitter has been a great boon for me. But I still periodically check Yahoo News and scan the morning Washington Post.

However, I don’t know if Twitter is up to the job. I’ve experienced numerous issues with it and have seen a lot of issues reported by others too. To be a reliable route for breaking news it has to perform better when under pressure.

I personally don’t use Twitter anymore. Problems aside, it is extremely difficult to keep up with if you follow more than a few users. I have since moved to Plurk, which serves a similar function but in a much more accessible format. Of course, this kind of thing is very much down to preference.

@Rich I can understand the risk of spam, but during the Twitticentre of the earthquake, would a spam message have spent more than a minute or two on the LA Times? I agree that there may need to be some form of filter, but we’ve got to be experimenting to work out the right way to do it…

Great post. Of course news sites need to adapt, just like they adapted for the internet last decade, they need to adapt to “web 2.0″ this decade.

However, it’s not always as clear cut as you make out. Take aggregation for example. If you simply set up a Twitter search when a major news story breaks, it’s easy for advertisers to slip in a key word and sell products with dubious connections to the story. Worse, spammers will just abuse it with unrelated topics/links.

There needs to be an element of moderation. Or perhaps someone just monitoring Twitter full-time and highlighting the best posts.

Another point is that Twitter is still far from mainstream. It’s amazing, of course, but it still has some way to go before it gets public acceptance (maybe another year or two?).

Perhaps the bigger challenge is the limited number of reporters. Reporters can’t be everywhere. So I would recommend letting people self-identify themselves as citizen journalsits, empowering them to post news stories they find and then benefiting from their extended network of news. So when stories do break, these guys can speed up the process of getting it ont the websites.

I stopped buying newspapers quite some time ago as the content to me was old by the time it hit the shops. Likewise I have now stopped reading the BBC website as again the news is old by the time it is reported.

Local news is even worse, they often report as “Breaking News” a story first tweeted about 48hrs earlier.

They really need to wake up or be left behind. Is it a question of education? perhaps they don’t even use social media personally, perhaps they view it as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo and believe it is something the kids do!

If the news websites employed a small team of web surfers instead of an army of reporters they would have quicker, more relevant news to report, furthermore they could report the news that is being most talked about and which is deemed more valuable by joe public.