Om Malik posts about the segregation of media into two distinct branches: the raw stream of dispatches from such services as Twitter, and the old media stream of more reflectiveness.
No question, a lot of self-congratulatory Tweets ran around this week as the terrorism in Mumbai was witnessed and committed to Twitter. But the question Malik poses is one many of us wonder about: In the age of breathlessness, where is the calmer assessment going to fit?
We found in our research earlier this year that consumers enjoy the breaking-news nature of online media, and that if we can supply it well, so much the better. But they had a need in their lives for context, reflection, analysis, even considered (as opposed to visceral and immediate) commentary, and so the newspaper (if it could reshape itself) would serve well. And, interestingly, they didn't seem eager to get that contextual depth online --- perhaps the user experience of the backlit screen, with its limited portability and lines of definition for type and images, didn't live up to that hard-wired ink-on-paper experience.
