News is a flow

Some great articles linking from Dave Winer's blog lately. Starting with What worked for HBO won't work for news:

What worked for HBO won't work for the news because HBO is ficition, and news is not. You can take years writing and developing a story on HBO, polish it, cut out parts that don't support the plot you've devised, even drop the series in the middle if you lose interest. That doesn't happen with the news. News is happening all the time, on its own schedule, all over the place, including many places you don't have reporters.

... which links to Sources go direct -- of which my favorite bit is

To understand how news works, you need to visualize a flow diagram that includes all the elements of the news process. All the people, not just the reporters and editors. That's where the growth is going to come from

And from there a link to a twitter discussion, on how to tell truth from deceit. Best quote:

It just seems wildly plausible to me that there's an important role to be played between sources within a story and others who are not souces within that given story. The intermediating role may be relatively diminished in the future, but it doesn't seem likely to vanish altogether. Even open systems need verifiers and third-party synthesizers, no?

That rings true to me. I don't think the answer is necessarily that we all get our own personal view of the universe filtered through our twitter-friends or Friendfeed, though. There is still a place for the professional editor, even in the world of radically decentralized, flow-oriented journalism.