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When the story broke on the terror attacks in Mumbai there was much talk of news spreading through blogs and social networks like Twitter.  Details of the siege were reported minute by minute by people who were there.  There is no doubt that the rise in citizen journalism and the availability of these channels has provided a new layer of news sourcing where information comes fast and direct.

It was the medium of radio however that brought the events into vivid and immediate focus.  As the siege was taking place Jim Naughtie on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme conducted an extraordinary interview.  Business lawyer Mark Abell was barricaded in his room inside the Oberoi hotel whist the murder and mayhem was taking place.  “As I entered my room there was a massive blast …and the gunfire has been going on throughout the night” he said, ”there is no escape and we haven’t heard anything from anybody.”  The immediacy and reality of the situation along with Mark’s stoic bravery was evident throughout.Mark escaped and was interviewed again on Today, 24 hours later.  He described his release and the full horror of the carnage he saw when he was escorted under armed guard through the lobby of the hotel.

Radio can deliver insight that text or still image based channels never can.   I have always been persuaded by the views of Gary Carter of FremantleMedia who argues that so called ‘old media’ are not replaced by new they continue co-exist.  He argues  ”The only mass communication medium in history to have been replaced by another is the telegraph and …arguably, of course, the telegram was not a mass communication technology.”

We need to stop thinking of media in terms of “newness” and think more in terms of “richness”.   We can be seduced by something shiny and new and but we must still celebrate that which we already have.

The way we get our news is changing.  Just over a week ago I learnt that french actor (and son of Gerard) Guillaume Depardieu had died.  He was not well known outside France so it’s perhaps not surprising that I didn’t hear about it in the British press.  I didn’t come across it through the media in France either.  I saw it on Twitter.  A colleague Lucille Reynard in the Paris office of our sister company TBWA\ posted “Guillaume Depardieu est mort :/ suis triste” at 5.50pm on October 13th.

I checked on Google News there was nothing there.  I looked up his Wikipedia entry and it confirmed he had died that day.  The news reports started to appear about half an hour later. 

I already use Twitter as a kind of news feed; following the BBC, sections of The Guardian and the New York Times as well as a selection of media industry feeds. What was different about this was that Lucille (or @lovny as she is on Twitter) was aware of the news because Guillaume was a friend of a friend. 

Because Twitter limits its posts to 140 characters it is quick and immediate.   The responses on Twitter to event’s like earthquakes are well documented.  The value of Twitter in these situations is that it is instant and unfiltered.  When a moderate earthquake struck near Los Angeles in the summer official news began to emerge after just four minutes. That sounds pretty quick until you examine what happened on Twitter.  The first update said simply “Earthquake” and it was posted seconds after the Earthquake began.  After four minutes the word earthquake was trending on Twitter Search with several thousand updates.  

When NASA’S Phoenix Mars Lander found water on Mars there were Twitter discussions as to whether the story was true several hours before any major news organisation announced the story.  This speculation was fuelled by a Twitter feed called MarsPhoenix, clearly written by a NASA project insider as if it were the voice of the lander itself.  It twittered the news hours before NASA issued a press announcement.

As more people join Twitter we will hear more and more information direct from the source.  We already have citizen journalists perhaps this is the start of the citizen news-wire.