

Canada beats the U.S.A., and Twitter beats the New York Times - cwan
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/02/canada_vs_us_twitter_vs_nyt.html

======
conover
Does The New York Times really care about being first to report hockey news? I
thought they were more about investigative reporting and analysis. It would be
stupid, in my opinion, for them to try and compete with Twitter on this front.

~~~
imok20
While I completely agree, and upvoted you for it, I think the implication of
this is more along the lines of "whoa, the NYT is no longer the formost
producer of breaking news (mostly.)"

The NYT _should_ focus more on investigative reporting and analysis, and
Twitter should stick to being about getting information out there as fast as
people can type. To each it's own, right?

 __EDIT __: To those who downvote, I'm curious as to why you did; this makes a
lot of sense to me, and I'd like to hear contrasting opinions.

 __EDIT2 __: I think I must not have been clear at all: I agree with the OP.
Completely. I'm just saying that no, the NYT doesn't care about getting out
information as soon as possible. BNO does, that's why they're slightly better
than the NYT at it. Twitter delivers a little bit of news in small bites – for
some, that isn't sufficient (and it isn't for me either, though Twitter is a
nice heads-up for when I'm not watching the news). But bites of news can be
transmitted in 140 characters, or at the very least they can contain links to
news (such as, again, BNO's links.) I don't see the controversy here, but I
suppose that must be the Twitter kool-aid.

~~~
chancho
_A minute later, at 2:54 p.m., the news was in the Breaking News Twitter feed.
Two minutes later, at 2:56 p.m., the New York Times had the news in its
Twitter feed, and word of the result buzzed into my phone via the Breaking
News app. Three minutes after that, at exactly 2:59 p.m., the NYTimes.com news
alert showed up in my email inbox_

All of this happened in a span of time shorter than the interval at which most
email clients check for new mail. I think the case against NYT here is
overstated. And this news was about the outcome of a sporting event which is
exactly one bit of information which becomes available at a predictable time.
Basically it comes down to who can hit the button faster. When real news
happens (a natural disaster, an assassination) it will take at least those few
minutes to figure out WTF happened and write it up.

------
trjordan
If you look one step further upstream, everybody on Twitter probably got their
news from traditional media: NBC's broadcast of the game.

~~~
jsharpe
What about the tens of thousands of people at the game?

------
adriand
It could also be that the people at the NYT hit the button first, but their
email servers are not quite as quick as Twitter.

