The Iran Election Twitters In a Revolution -- In the Media

In the midst of this round-the-clock updating, Sullivan took time out for a think piece in London's Sunday Times. The Twitter stream, he wrote, "reads like a stream of constantly shifting consciousness. It is a kind of journalistic pointillism. From a distance it gains heft. 

It is history rendered in the collective, scattered mind and it has never happened before—millions upon millions of tiny telegram messages sent to the world. . . . Something changed last week—something we will not forget and that will transform the way we cover and consume breaking news. It happened suddenly and from the ground up. No one can control it anymore. They can merely stand by and die or join in and create. This was indeed the 'big one'—and it is just getting going."

This is the beginning of a new hybrid journalism, blending smart analysis, common-sense news gathering, old-school credibility, and new social media empowerment. Sullivan and Pitney did it hours (an Internet lifetime) ahead of everyone else and without the past century's must-haves: a foreign bureau, a printing press, or a microphone. So-called old media types should follow their lead, as well as that of Murrow, who, when his radio news show, Hear It Now, jumped to television as See It Now, said: "This is an old team trying to learn a new trade." Time for the old team to try learning a new trade again.

• See editorial cartoons on Iran.
• Check out our political cartoons.
• Become a political insider: Subscribe to U.S. News Weekly, our new digital magazine.