Even relative geezers like me understand there is something afoot in the way media are being dissembled and reconstructed by consumers --- find a piece here, get a search result there, a send-to-a-friend, get-from-a-friend couple of clicks, and you've got an adequate fill of information to form a view.
The U.S. presidential race is the best petri dish to study for any such new pattern of consumption, so today's New York Times story is welcome information on how younger voters are replacing conventional filters (CNN, Washington Post, even itself) with social media. They're sharing content like never before.
It's clear that the enthusiasts of social media have new ways to distribute content among themselves. Some see this as one more sign that the traditional media are on borrowed time, but it's also clear that someone has to generate and edit content. How that content is distributed and shared might decide how well it is financed, but the challenge for conventional media is to determine how to (not if it should) participate.
