Twitter scoops CNN?

In the age of Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, are new media outlets becoming better sources for news than the media outlets of yore?

As thousands of opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad swarmed the streets of central Tehran on Saturday, protesting the allegedly unfair election and battling baton-wielding police, cable news networks were surprisingly quiet. MSNBC was mostly showing their usual weekend crime documentaries, and the top story on CNN's website was people's confusion about the switch from analog to digital TV.

Cable news’ — especially CNN’s — lack of coverage caused public outrage. News junkies turned to Twitter, which many Iranians use to communicate to the outside world, for the latest updates. ReadWriteWeb's post entitled "Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran" called Twitter the "best place to follow events going on in [Iran]" and stated that "CNN's failure to engage with the story is one of the hottest topics of conversation there."

Twitterers themselves did not hold back in expressing their disappointment with CNN's coverage, or lack thereof.

The CNN failure meme (#cnnfail) quickly became one of the top ten trends on Twitter on Saturday, continuing to Sunday. The NYT noted that while Atlanta resident Steve LaBate tweeted "Why aren't you covering this with everything you've got?," CNN was showing a Larry King Live repeat on the stars of the "American Chopper." CNN anchor Don Lemon took to Twitter to defend the network. He tweeted: "understanding how tweets can catch fire, we have been covering iran all eve. more than any u.s. or foreign net. plus info on cnn.com 24 hrs."

Is Lemon right? Did CNN have a good reason for not fully covering the perils in Iran this weekend? According to niacINsight (the blog of the National Iranian American Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization), the Iranian government made a decisive move to shut down all foreign reporting. Some bloggers are quick to defend the news behemoth.  "CNN is being maligned unfairly. CNN is a TV network, which means it needs video footage to cover something in depth,” according to TomsTechBlog.com, "Iranian police are confiscating cameras and arresting cameramen."

And Twitter's not perfect. Searching #iranelection will give you a mishmash of seemingly factual, intelligent posts, hidden between scores of reposts and banal ramblings. That leaves a lot of verification up to the user. New York magazine concludes that instead of seeing Twitter as a medium that will eventually supplant news networks, Twitter should be "a complement medium, one that performs a different function than cable news, newspapers, or radio do."

As the age of newspapers seems to move closer to its end, and real-time, online, and citizen journalism grows in strength and credibility, this incident may in fact turn out to be an important part of media history: The day when the best news of the day was brought to you in 140 characters or less.

In the spirit of new media, here's a list of popular links related to the Iran election (Warning: Some links may contain graphic images).


Twitter:

The latest tweets can be found by typing #iranelection into the Twitter search.

An aggregator that automatically bundles together the latest Iran tweets

Twittersearch provides real-time updates from Twitter as they come in.

Images:

This Iran-based Iran feed

Collection of YouTube videos tracking the election

Blogs:

Huffington Post's liveblog

Tehran Bureau is a well-connected blog from expats, experts and academics.

Blog aggregation site Global Voices  features analysis and images sent from contributors in Tehran.

The National Iranian American Council live-blogs and translates Twitter messages from Farsi into English.

-Allison Louie-Garcia

Yahoo! News bloggers compile the best news content from our providers and scour the Web for the most interesting news stories so you don't have to.