from BrianSolis.com:

The Information Divide Between Traditional And New Media

In the era of the real-time web, information travels at a greater velocity than the infrastructure of mainstream media can support as it exists today. As events materialize, the access to social publishing and syndication platforms propels information across attentive and connected nodes that link social graphs all over the world. Current events are now at the epicenter of global attention as social media makes the world a much smaller place.

… Indeed social media is changing, documenting, and also making history, revolutionizing once invincible industries that are now paralyzed by confusion, fear, and ignorance. Although they’re reacting now, it will take more than the iPad, Kindle, Nook and other digital readers to revitalize the business of media.

Information moves with or without them…

News no longer breaks, it tweets – demonstrating the efficiency, momentum and influence of the human network. With every new iterative update, social graphs transform into a highly organized information distribution system that resembles an “Amber Alert” network for the social Web – with far greater speed, reach, impact and resonance.

… We no longer find information; it finds us. And, trending topics become touchpoints to the state of events as they unfold.

Social media is only accelerating and in the process, it dramatically reduces the time between an event and collective awareness, growing increasingly pervasive and prominent along the way. As such, a divide now exists between the materialization and journalistic reporting of an event and as such, this gap immediately fills with tweets, updates, and posts as the crowd-powered socialization of information steps in to fill the void.