This past weekend amidst the social unrest taking place in Iran two interesting media related things took place.Both CNN and Fox News provided extensive live coverage all weekend, nearly 24/7, while MSNBC provided infomercials and re-runs of NBCUniversal produced Investigation series programming practically 24/7. What was MSNBC thinking? I guess big events can only happen Monday through Friday. Weak. Are the resources of NBC News not deep enough anymore? Both FNC and CNN had their big gun news people in the house and both had a fairly deep bench of people trying to uncover information worldwide.
It seems to me that the competitive battle here dictates you throw the budgets and egos away and do what needs to be done to be competitive. A good reminder for us radio folk.
Secondly, this weekends news events are yet another seminal moment in the development of social networking and video enabled smartphones (worldwide) and the power that Twitter possess. In fact, much of the information (that Fox and CNN is using) coming out of Iran was through mobile handheld video and Tweets. Powerful.
Fox was using a Twitter aggregator I had not heard of before. You can check out Monitter here. Simply type in key words in each of the three provided headers and watch the worldwide Tweets start displaying. BTW--wouldn't it be interesting to monitor the activities of your competition this way? Hmmmm.
