The powerful launch of Google Buzz (Mashable | Google Buzz has completely changed the game) last week signals the arrival of the Real Time Web as a truly new media. It’s been well documented that Twitter has established itself a breaking news source. Google Buzz, Facebook and Twitter form a triumvirate channel for sourcing news media that will continue to grow in influence.
The real time web implies that online news will flow more and more through applications, not websites. The problem facing mainstream media is their dependence on traffic through their websites for advertising revenue.
The journalistic media on the other hand continue to try to erect walls that halt traffic flow through their websites, either by charging subscriptions (New York Newsday gets 35 subscribers after three months), by limiting access to their content by aggregators (Murdoch’s gambit with blocking Google from indexing Sky News content), or simply by not providing an RSS feed for syndication (Santa Barbara News Press and many other local publications).
Social media thrives on RSS to find, deliver and syndicate news from journalistic media, and it directs traffic back to the news source. If the traditional news media continues to ignore social media sourced breaking news, they risk becoming irrelevant to their communities who demand this real time news. People will eventually find that real time news directly from their community via one of their social networks and news aggregation applications.
