Last night, I was trying to find out information about the horrifying situation and in Iran. I turned to CNN which had Larry King interviewing bikers. MSNBC had a documentary about prisons. FoxNews had the Huckabee show, talking about credit cards.
Then I went to HuffingtonPost, TalkingPointsmemo.com and AndrewSullivan, all of whom had real-time YouTube videos from the protests, Twitter-based reporting, pictures posted on Facebook, great analysis. All of that led to some crowing by the bloggers that the Iran debacle shows the bankruptcy of mainstream media.
To me, though, if you look at the whole picture,, we’re seeing the best of both styles of media. Look through this excellent compilation put together by Huffington Post and note the important contributions of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, BBC, Newsweek, Channel 4 of England, and other mainstream media outlets — most of it accessible on the internet. They’re using their own reporters and, increasingly, themselves using photos and videos from Iranian citizens. That combines with an extraordinary flow of user generated content, tweets, and independent bloggers, including some in iran.
If we can figure out how to tap into the best of both media forms, we’ll enter a golden age of journalism rather than the dark ages.