What do the Occupy Wall Street protests have to do with the digital news revolution?

Turns out, quite a bit.

Occupy Seattle Photos (c) Eric Becker / We Are Shouting

Until recently, the effective strength and success of protest movements was ultimately determined not in the streets, but in editorial meetings. Newspapers and broadcasters would decide how much play to give the protesters, who would wait with bated breath for the 5 o’clock news or the next morning’s edition to see how much anyone else would hear about their cause. Sometimes they got plenty of attention, like when the WTO came to Seattle in 1999. But this system awarded aggressive behavior from protesters and police, taking notice proportional to property destruction and tear gas, while massive marches like the ones on the eve of the Iraq invasion were effectively ignored if they were peaceful.

But the game has changed.

Newspapers don’t dictate what’s news now. With the rise of Twitter, and the bloggosphere, the diversity of other voices online tell them what’s news. Read more…

As I write this, irreverent social web headline service Fark.com is on its 8th thread about post-election Iran (“The Revolution will not be televised; it will be Blogged, Twittered, and Farked.”). Twitter feed #iranelection has replaced CNN as the go-to place for breaking news about this dramatic, heart-wrenching story (see #cnnfail).

Just last week, a Harvard study concluded (as breathlessly summed up by the BBC) “Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite the hype surrounding it.”  Tonight, NBC’s “Chief Foreign Correspondent” Richard Engel is back in network’s NYC studio, banished by Iranian authorities, relegated to monitoring — as we are — firsthand reports on “Twitter…and other online sites.” [p.s. I worked with Richard in Baghdad in 2004]

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Journalism faces an unprecedented existentialist crisis, due to the economy, new digital platforms, and dwindling advertising revenues.  In collaboration with the Online News Association and the UW Journalism program, we hosted this forward-looking forum on potential future models of news.

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