When my grandparents were young they waited months for news about the war because it had to be mailed from the theatre of operations back across the oceans to Australia, before it could be printed in a newspaper or broadcast on the radio for everyone to see and hear.

When I was younger we had newspaper, TV and radio and those media companies had the advantage of phone networks they could use to get their information from at a faster pace. They were trusted to get the news from where it happened and deliver it to us wherever we were.

Today the world is much more connected. Mobile phones let us access the internet pretty much anywhere and as events happen we can share them with each other instantly. We don’t need to wait for some media company to cast their editorial gaze over it before printing or broadcasting – we can do that ourselves. This has been happening a lot recently and Twitter is often mentioned alongside.

This is all possible because we are all interconnected, we all have our mobiles with us all of the time, and those mobiles have cameras. Each one of us is a potential media author.

There have been heaps of events and I personally find the smaller ones more interesting – but it is the style of event that you expect to see in the media that people love to talk about right now. There were the earthquakes, Thailand, Mumbai, and more recently a plane crash in Denver.

Coverage of the plane crash in Denver, via twitter.

There were a number of twitterers around the airport, but @2drinksbehind was actually in the plane – clearly closer than any traditional media could possibly be.

This is what he had to say, after “Holy fucking shit I wasbjust in a plane crash!”:

And then he posted this photo from the scene.

The media are still useful for providing high quality content – I have to admit I do love the Big Picture Blog from the Boston Globe. They followed the story and sent a helicopter to the scene to get these shots.

The traditional media scene is coming to terms with the new models of business. It is clear that what they have done in the past is failing fast with the new possibilities of the web. We are happy to take a cut in quality for increased speed of publication, and we are happy to produce the content and provide the editorial ourselves.

Apps like Qik let us stream live video from anywhere our mobiles are connected, which is hugely powerful. I can upload a photo and message in about 30 seconds, in fact I just did from Liaison cafe in Melbourne. If we pair these social media object options with a simple yet powerful messaging platform like Twitter the possibilities are huge.

This is how news breaks from now on.

By Ross Hill - December 22nd, 2008 at 4:03pm with 1,591 views - boston globe denver mumbai qik thailand twitpic twitter