Proponents of a new world of journalism saw a hugely missed opportunity this weekend.

You’ve probably heard about the protests in Iran. You may also heard about the outrage across the Internet that it took major news corporations a few days to get their act together and start covering it. If not, here’s a recap:
The day Twitter kicked CNN’s behind & @ev bought me a whisky
#CNNfail: Twitter Blasts CNN Over Iran Election
Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran

While everyone was criticizing CNN I wonder if the real failure was new journalism. Where are the new independent news sites? Yeah everyone turned to CNN and the other big dogs for their breaking World news fix but all the news was already out there.
We don’t need foreign corespondents we have native corespondents!
We don’t need a news bureau we have real people on the streets!
What happened to the promise of new journalism?

If you wanted to follow along with the news you had one of two options. Sit around and wait for news corporations to catch up or jump around several dozen sites, follow several different Twitter and FriendFeed searches and hope that you were getting the full story or that all the information was factual.

What we really needed were a few social media savvy bloggers, ideally ex-reporters (I think there a few of those) who have some background on the story, who could search around in real time gathering links, pics and tweets while fact checking and reporting in one spot what was going on. Even with the searching around they would have crushed any reporting efforts by CNN or anyone else.

This wasn’t a failure by CNN it was a failure by the state of journalism as a whole. The industry is ripe and ready for for a new model but so far no one seems to be able to do it. Tom’s TechBlog has a good write up.

TomsTechBlog.com - Facts on Iran, Twitter, CNN and The Tech Community In General

What do you think? I’m no journalist and have no training nor any time in the industry so I’m really just shooting from the peanut gallery, but I have to believe there’s a better solution.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Murdoch’s Plan for Paid Content Could Work (newcommbiz.com)
• Iran ‘Allows Facebook After Election Block’ (news.sky.com)
• Buffalo Plane Crash - Social Media (1) Traditional Media (0) (andreavascellari.com)
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk - Using ConvoTrack to track who’s talking about you (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• Why more channels equals more relevance (thisisgoingtobebig.com)