The Digital News Lifecycle: Why Breaking News on Twitter isn’t News Anymore 

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(Even) I’m getting a little tired of reading newspaper articles and blog posts on how Twitter was the first source of news alert on the US Airways flight 1549 crash-landing in New York’s Hudson river (see Twitter, Twitpic, Wikipedia, Venture Beat, Silicon Alley Insider, BBC dot.life Blog, The Guardian, WSJ Digits, WebProNews, CNet).

Let’s get used to it. From this moment onwards, every accident worth reporting, anywhere in the world, will be reported first, via SMS, by a bystander who has a mobile phone. In most cases, the first photos or videos of the accident will be taken by a bystander who has a camera phone. If the accident occurs in a developed country, or a metro city in a developing country, the SMS will be sent to a microblogging service like Twitter and the photos and videos will be uploaded to photo- and video-sharing websites like Flickr and YouTube. From this moment onwards, we will do well to expect it to happen, and reserve our surprise for the cases when it doesn’t happen.

The Digital News Lifecycle

In fact, going forward, we can expect to see the following news lifecycle for almost all unplanned breaking news stories (adapted from the “news diamond” by Paul Bradshaw via Valeria Maltoni) –

1. Twitter Alert: A bystander (accidental citizen journalist) will break the story via Twitter.

2. Blog Post: News organizations and bloggers will pick up the story and write a quick blog post about it, often with a link to the tweet or the photo.

3. Article/ Package: News organizations will convert the story into a 300 word newspaper article or a 3 minute TV story.

4. Context: Bloggers, news organizations and Wikipedia contributors will quickly start compiling background material on the story.

5. Analysis: Bloggers and news organizations will offer in-depth analysis on the story, and news organizations will often interview the bloggers who have broken the story or provided the most context on it, as part of their analysis.

6. Conversation: The conversation will continue in the comments sections of blogs and news websites, on Twitter and on social networking, social voting, and social bookmarking websites.

7. Customization: The entire story, across multiple formats and sources, will be available as an archive that can be searched by tags, accessed in various formats, including RSS feeds, and recombined to provide context for future stories.

As the news story will move through its lifecycle, both the depth of the story and its reach will increase, hit the peak in the context or analysis stage, and then decrease thereafter, as the interest in the story decreases. The story will move from alert to analysis in an hour, a day, or a week, depending on the nature of the news. The conversation and customization stages will in the domain of the long tail and go on almost indefinitely, driven by search.

I must also say that my “news lifecycle” is different from Paul Bradshaw’s “news diamond” in two ways –

1. Paul’s “news diamond” looks at news from a news organization’s perspective, whereas my “news lifecycle” acknowledges that the boundaries between news creators, news curators and news consumers have blurred beyond recognition.

2. Paul does not make the distinction between unplanned breaking news events (like accidents and terrorist attacks) and planned live coverage of events (like the Super Bowl or the US presidential inauguration). Paul’s “news diamond” and my “news lifecycle” models are much more valid for unplanned breaking news events.

Once we accept that such a “news lifecycle” model will become the norm, from hereon, we can look beyond the hype about the efficiency and speed of participatory media and focus on the following questions –

1. How do we increase the number and variety of sources in the process of creating, curating and consuming news?

2. How do we separate signal from noise during each stage of the news lifecycle?

3. How do we contract the “alert” to “analysis” stages of the news lifecycle, in order to get better signal to noise ratio sooner in the cycle?

4. How to we expand the “conversation” to “customization” stages of the news lifecycle, in order to maximize the returns from the content we have created?

5. How do we expand the requisite participatory media ecosystem so that exceptions to this news lifecycle (like the information void in the Israel-Hamas Gaza conflict or the Russia-Georgia Otessia conflict) become increasingly rare?

Any thoughts?

Cross-posted on my personal blog.