SpectatorBytes

A few months back, I wrote about the emergence of the real-time Web and the impact it would have on content publishing. In recent weeks, the news coverage on the Web of the fallout from the election in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson have crystallized for me the impact of the real-time Web on news production and publishing.  We are witnessing the dawn of a new era in news: in fact, I would equate this game-changing moment to that of watching the images of “Desert Storm” on CNN in 1990.

To illustrate the revolution in the news consumption experience, I will share a personal experience from a couple of weekends ago following the news coming out of Iran. I first learned about the election protests when TV-channel surfing early Saturday morning.  I quickly abandoned the TV, turned my attention to my PC, and pulled up two news sites that I rely on for up-to-the minute news, Huffington Post and The Drudge Report. As I began to read the story, my appetite for additional information grew.  So, I went to Twitter Search to get more information, and there I received real-time updates and comprehensive coverage given the number of people, who like me, were following the story.

Once I found myself immersed in “#IranElection” a couple of interesting things happened. First, I found other sites/blogs which fellow Tweeters thought were doing a good job covering the story. There were several that stood out, including the Vigilante Journalist, NYT’s The Lede, and Twubs.com/#Iran Election. I was particularly glad to learn about Andrew Sullivan’s the Daily Dish. He was “live-blogging” the events from Iran in a way that I found pretty interesting. He was “curating” the tweetspehere and sharing what he thought were the most interesting tweets, adding videos from YouTube as they were uploaded, and posting links about interesting articles and news releases. He was updating the content every two to five minutes.

Second, this experience gave me a sense that I was as close to the story as I have ever been to the extent that I began to identify individuals in Twitter whose tweets I wanted to follow. Even though the overall “streaming” experience felt overwhelming at first, I was soon able to determine to whom I should be paying attention pretty quickly. I started to follow a couple of Iranians whose reporting on the events seemed accurate as far as I could tell. I determined this by matching their reporting to the video images that would emerge hours later.  Also, I have to confess that the Twitter community led me to find those people as it provided me with signals on whose reporting to trust via retweets, links and outright recommendations. After just a few minutes, I was getting “real-time” news coverage about the Iran elections protests. I have to say that my TV was still on in the background and I turned my attention to it a couple of times when CNN’s Christiane Amanpour commented on the day’s events.

There are several elements of my new news experience, which deserve to be called out:

- People Rather Than Brand: I found myself following more individuals rather than websites. The live-blogging experience from HuffPo’s Nico Pitney and Andrew Sullivan made me feel that I was sharing the experience with them rather than with the Huffington Post or The Atlantic. Certainly, in Twitter, I was following people, rather than news brands.

- No editor required: I found it particularly interesting that I was able to focus on facts and events that I thought were important rather than what an “editor” thought to be important.  I was creating my own storyline around the news event, relying on my judgment to filter the content I was consuming. This made consuming news a more involved activity but at the same time much more rewarding. For a big part of the day, I was “news hunting.” I guess it unlocked my investigative instinct.

- Bigger news appetite: As I got more involved with the story, my appetite for news grew. I kept on following the events on my blackberry after leaving home. I consumed news of the event for a solid 16 hours.

- Introduction of Live blogging to the masses: This is something that has happened in the digital media industry for several years now. Tech bloggers reporting Apple keynotes, conference gatherings, company layoffs, etc. I have always found the format to be really satisfying. Seeing this construct in action during the Iran election events prove to me that it will be part of the future of news.

- Use of tech tools: My news experience involved using a broad set of the ecosystem of Web tools such as Twitter and Google’s language translators, Twitpic, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook among others.

This news experience may be unique due to the nature of the news event (as you may know, the international press was prevented from reporting on this event).  However, it does highlight how the news consumption experience is likely to evolve with the arrival of the real-time Web.

Exciting times are afoot for the newshounds in all of us.