The chart shows the number of Twitter tweets per second during the events leading up to President Barack Obama's announcement Sunday nght that Osama Bin Laden was killed by US Navy Seals. At it's highest point, the chart shows about 5,200 tweets per second. What this also shows is how many people use Twitter to share information.
An Ad Age Blogger named Simon Dumenco, writing in a way that contained a nasty tone which invites disagreement, was trying to say that the story of Bin Laden's demise was not broke by Twitter.
He gives reasons that are shaky, claiming that because Keith Urbahn, former chief of staff for ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted "So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn" and then asked for the tweet to be verified, it was not the breaking news.
Then the Ad Age Blogger insisted that because Urbann got the information from a TV News Producer, it means "mainstream media" was the source.
That's wrong.
The Ad Age Blogger confuses titles with actions. The "TV News Producer" wasn't in the act of being a TV news producer at the time, just a person spreading information. Now, if the source was on some media outlet, then we're not talking about Twitter as the source, but television - that's not the conversation here.
The bottom line is that Twitter and everyone else recognizes that Twitter was the source and that journalists played a role that Hearst Newspapers Executive Vice President of Content Development and legend Phil Bronstein said they would play in our interview last year about the changing face of media: as fact checker.
The bottom line is that media today is multi-media, and you'd fast better adjust to this new world or be harmed by it.
Stay tuned.
