Social Media effect: the democratization of news gathering and reporting

Social Networks in general, and Twitter specifically, are changing the way that people collect and distribute their information, especially on breaking events. Here is some concrete evidence.

PaidContent is reporting that Time spent on 17 of the 30 most-trafficked newspaper websites fell last month, while the rest of the sites had minimal, if any, gains, according to Nielsen Online data.

I wanted to take a closer look at the relevant data so I tracked Twitter’s growth versus the top 4 online news destinations, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. What I found was that in last 3 months Twitter has overtaken every single major online news services. (Chart Below) Twitter (and social Media) in some cases is becoming a quoted news source, as has been happening with the Iran election coverage.

Source: Compete

What does this mean? In my humble opinion it means that the age of the citizen journalist is upon us. This will change everything!

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