Peers vs. Pros: Who's Faster on News?

One of the most fundamental shifts over the last several years has been the incredible acceleration of the news cycle. Today information travels faster than it ever did before. The pros and peers not only compete, they complete each other. Clearly technology is enabling this and mobile devices and cameraphones are giving it serious juice. 

These changes are at the heart of why the PR business needs to adopt a whole new way of working. As my CEO Richard Edelman is often heard saying, we need to now facilitate horizontal peer-to-peer communication even as we continue to rely on the traditional top-down media centric model that built our industry.

Here's an example that shows how pros and peers work in the wild and how the latter can help the former distribute information faster.

Over the past few weeks I have become totally addicted to Twitter - a micro blogging platform that is tied to IM and SMS. I am using it to actively lifeblog wherever I go. I share bits that include everything from meeting Carmen Electra yesterday to SMSing bite-sized nuggets that could one day be blown out here as posts (or perhaps not). The fact that the platform integrates with my mobile device makes all the difference. If you're interested, you might want to subscribe to my Twitter feed.

Twitter does more than keep me closer to my friends. It allows them to share news with me. Take a look at the screen grab below. I learned about Scooter Libby's conviction from Jason Calacanis minutes before I did from CNN and using the same channel of information. In this case, a Twitter IM.

Now I don't expect my friends to beat the pros on a big story like this. After all, the news media was there at the courtroom. Still, news big and small travels across all channels and this little anecdote shows that sometimes the peers are a lot faster because of the technology.