Cynthia McCune's Library tagged internet →  View Popular

The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?

It’s all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.

What we lack is a trusted network built on new information. This, actually, is what newspaper is.

But it's also what Twitter is.

If Armageddon has broken out, then we hope our newspaper editor has saw fit to put that somewhere in the paper. Preferably on the front page. Twitter works on a filtering process too. And the filters are humans too. The difference, of course, is that we choose those filters: We select those people we follow. But otherwise the process is remarkably similar.

We might call it "discovery" - the encounter of information we didn't necessarily know we needed to know, but are glad we did. That's probably not a bad definition of news, come to think of it.

Chances are, once you've started following a decent range of Twitterers, you've plugged yourself into one of the best information networks there is.

Check it out. And then maybe you'll see why it's maybe the toughest challenge yet facing newspapers and other old guard media.

witter has other attractions. It's simple, which was something RSS hasn't quite managed to do.

It's short: Twitter was designed for mobile phone SMS messages, and so each message has to be 140 characters or less. As we found with SMS some time ago, this enforced brevity is a blessing, not a limitation.

There's another key part to this too: identity. Twitter users are usually not anonymous. Some are, but the vast majority are either clearly identified individuals or institutions.

This makes it a lot easier to filter out noise-why trust what someone has to say if you don't know who they are? - and also brings Twitter closer to what a newspaper editor does.

• There is no mass audience.
• There is no barrier to publication.
• The cost of operating legacy organizations increases indefinitely as profit decreases indefinitely.
• There is nothing cyclical about this change.