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The Media Oxpecker: Twitter’s ‘CNN Moment’

Every Friday we round up media & tech industry news you may have missed while you were busy going batshit.

  • Was Osama Bin Laden’s death a “CNN moment” for Twitter? Business Insider notes that by the time President Obama spoke at 11:35pm EDT on Sunday:

    . . . the Twitter stream had already moved from rumor to fact to strange observations (Hitler was confirmed dead exactly 66 years before) to criticisms of Fox News (for spelling “Osama” with a “B”) to inappropriate jokes and fake accounts — OsamainHell tweeted about not being able to do any more videos, while GhostOsama regretted enabling location on his tweets.

    Meanwhile, Obama finished talking and Brian Williams resumed his solemn platitudes and the TV suddenly seemed very old and boring.

    In other words, Twitter was faster, more accurate, and more entertaining than any other news source out there.

    New York magazine editor Adam Moss says that the event made him a Twitter convert, acknowledging, “Some of the information was incorrect but it corrects itself and that’s how it works.”

  • Meanwhile, TweetDeck had its UberTwitter-moment and was acquired by Twitter for $40 – $50 million.

  • The web commenting platform Disqus, which AAN began using for this site a couple weeks ago, raised $10 million in venture capital funds.

  • The PR industry is quietly filling the vacuum left by shrinking newsrooms. Both industries might want to incorporate more multimedia into their press releases and news stories, seeing as how using multimedia delivers better results.

  • Felix Salmon takes a look at Groupon’s business model and says that, if business owners calculate it correctly, the service can be a win-win.

  • News Corp has lost $10 million on The Daily so far this year.

  • You’d be surprised at how easy it is for someone to completely wipe out your company’s Facebook page by making bogus copyright claims.

  • The U.S. online display advertising market delivered 1.1 trillion impressions in the first quarter of 2011.

  • Patch – the local blog network which lost $40 million of AOL’s money during the first quarter of 2011 – has launched a blogging platform called “Local Voices,” according to Fishbowl NY:

    Obviously Huffington is hoping that the formula she used with The Huffington Post works for Patch as well. The problem, of course, is that a Patch in Fridley, Minnesota, doesn’t exactly offer the kind of exposure that HuffPo did. But hey, if the writers for Local Voices are indeed high school students, like Patch’s Editor-in-Chief Brian Farnham says they can be, at least they won’t have money to sue one day.

  • And finally, Kaplan Education suffered a deep drop in earnings due to problems with a scrappy news rag it runs in Washington, D.C.:

    At the flagship newspaper, The Washington Post, troubles with sliding print ads and declining circulation continued, while higher sales at the company’s online edition of the newspaper and the Slate group of Web sites failed to make up the shortfall.