Ed Morrow was doing it during the Second World War. But imagine Murrow with the reach Anonymous has. Now an enormous volume of diaristic information can travel world wide. It's got to change the dynamic. Meanwhile, we can also generate a high-level serious discussion within minutes of the actual news event.
TV has to worry about making sure the people they use look okay, and sound okay.
We don't have to worry about any of that. We can just get the best people, period. Not all journalists believe the changes discussed above are necessarily good ones. Brooke Shelby Biggs, news editor for Mother Jones magazine's online site, Mojo Wire, recently argued in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that e-mail dispatches from Kosovo compromise the news media's coverage of the war in Yugoslavia. So in place of real reporting, we're offered a flood of unmediated dispatches from nonjournalists often with a personal interest in how the war is fought and how it ends.