“The revolution wil not be televised” is a line from a great Public Enemy song.  I think it is safe to say that the revolution will be tweeted and flickrd and blogged.  Yesterday’s miraculous “splash landing” demonstrated that some of the best early coverage, including photographs and links to information about bird strikes could all be found within minutes of the event on Twitter.  I am also convinced that some of the best analyses of what actually happened and who did what to help avert a disaster will eventually come out on blogs of pilots, aviation safety experts, etc.  People with real expertise in the area of question providing their full account as opposed to having it filtered through a journalist.

The only area where traditional TV seems to be adding value at the moment is in its ability to attract passengers, crew, rescuers, etc. to provide over-the-phone or in person interviews.  I believe fairly little of that is the result of having reporters on the ground.  Instead, there still seems to be a significant pull for people to want to appear on TV and there is not (yet) a site or service or individual that has the same pull on the web.

It will be interesting to see when and how this last bit of value-added can be moved into more of an Internet model.  One approach would be someone like Larry King or Oprah getting this going by interviewing folks and posting on Youtube.  But as so often this may turn out to be a case where the innovation will come from the outside and TV will lose it’s opportunity.

“The revolution wil not be televised” is a line from a great Public Enemy song.  I think it is safe to say that the revolution will be tweeted and flickrd and blogged.  Yesterday’s miraculous “splash landing” demonstrated that some of the best early coverage, including photographs and links to information about bird strikes could all be found within minutes of the event on Twitter.  I am also convinced that some of the best analyses of what actually happened and who did what to help avert a disaster will eventually come out on blogs of pilots, aviation safety experts, etc.  People with real expertise in the area of question providing their full account as opposed to having it filtered through a journalist.

The only area where traditional TV seems to be adding value at the moment is in its ability to attract passengers, crew, rescuers, etc. to provide over-the-phone or in person interviews.  I believe fairly little of that is the result of having reporters on the ground.  Instead, there still seems to be a significant pull for people to want to appear on TV and there is not (yet) a site or service or individual that has the same pull on the web.

It will be interesting to see when and how this last bit of value-added can be moved into more of an Internet model.  One approach would be someone like Larry King or Oprah getting this going by interviewing folks and posting on Youtube.  But as so often this may turn out to be a case where the innovation will come from the outside and TV will lose it’s opportunity.