Hudson River Plane Crash and the media

US Airways flight 1549 ditches into New York's Hudson River, four minutes later Jim Hanrahan sends a photo to twitter.  IPhone owner Janis Krums uses his iphone and follows up with a number of images via a picture-posting version of twitter called TwitPic.   This was followed by floods of photos sent to Flickr and grainy videos to YouTube from users who have video capable cell phones.  All of this about 15 minutes before mainstream media mentioned it and to a much larger audience.

But it's not just the instant images, messages and videos that were updated and passed around the web.  The web's knowledge bases were also updated - instantly.  Within minutes The Web's encyclopedia, Widipedia, had a page up on flight 1549, as well as having it's entries on water crashes and survival rates updated.  

NowPublic, which is what is called a 'crowd sourced' media channel had a page up a bit later, effectively pulling together the various new and old media sources into one place - a kind of good overview with links to sources. 

Okay, so this points out the obvious differences between old and new media, but to me that's only the beginning, and it's why mainstream media is having such a hard time.  To the social generation it's all about learning about the incident immediately, wherever you are, and from a friend.  Now, 'friend' here is what the web considers friends - these can be web only acquaintances, friends of friends, or just folks you 'follow' because you find them interesting.  But, no matter what friend shared the story, it turns the news personal - it came from someone you know, it was personal "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy." (Janis Krum) and you can react like a friend by adding your feelings back into the conversation and forwarding it on.  Krum's friends saw the photo instantly; within 10 minutes it had gone to friends of friends of friends - a giant spiraling chain letter, until literally millions had heard about it.  And it's not only the story but also all the side stories that all these folks toss into the conversation.

Now compare that with hearing it on the radio or TV or a newspaper  (both if which you aren't doing if you are under 30).  It's one-way and impersonal, and, if you'e like most people, hours later.

So far, however, mainstream still has the ability to lead in follow up stories by sending out journalists and pulling together the (to me) endless interviews of the pilot's family, other pilots opinions, 'geese' experts, and the inevitable opeds about somehow connecting this good news story with 9/11.  

If I were to bet on whether mainstream media or the web was going to be the prime source for news, my money would be on the web to fill this space.  Not because mainstream doesn't have good reporters - it currently has most of them - but because the platform is the correct one.  As the population ages, all those folks that are used to the web and cell phones will drive the conversation and therefore the money, they aren't suddenly going to start reading newspapers.  

I personally believe that this era is really the first revolution in news to come along since Ben Franklin left his overbearing brother and started his own newspaper in Philadelphia.

Couple of interesting sidelights - Google's 'trends' which is a page that is supposed to show what everyone is chatting about that instant, didn't have anything for at least an hour - twitter's trend page was instantly humming.