The Politico piece, about an incident on Friday involving presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, calls it the “21-minute news cycle.” As Dylan Byers describes it, Romney made a comment at a campaign stop in Michigan about how no one had ever asked him for his birth certificate — a crack that appeared to refer to the controversial “birther” debate over where President Barack Obama was born. Within a matter of seconds, a reporter attending the event had posted the remark to Twitter, where it was then retweeted hundreds of times over the next few minutes (according to data Politico got from the Twitter-analytics service Topsy).

Political brush fires can erupt within minutes

Several minutes later, Politico and BuzzFeed had both posted items on it making the connection to the “birther” debate, and BuzzFeed had posted a video to YouTube of Romney making the statement. Within minutes, the Romney campaign had issued a comment saying the remark was taken out of context and that the candidate did not mean to dredge up the birth certificate issue again — a statement that was followed quickly by one from the Obama camp, which accused Romney of doing exactly that. Over the next few hours the news made its way to TV news shows and elsewhere, but most of the heat from the incident had more or less died down by the end of the day, and Byers noted that the event is a perfect example of how things have changed:

“Four years ago, the fallout from a controversial remark would have taken hours, if not a full day, to unfold. In 2012, social media, which enables reporters to file in real-time and puts increased pressure on campaigns to speed up their response time, has brought the pace of the news cycle down to a matter of minutes and seconds. The ‘one-day story’ — itself an archaic term in the 21st century — has become the one-hour story.”

This phenomenon is something we discussed at the paidContent 2012 conference in New York earlier this year, during a panel that I moderated with Vivian Schiller of NBC News and Josh Marshall of the political blog network Talking Points Memo. As Marshall described it, social media — including blogs such as his, which started the process that was later accelerated by Twitter and Facebook — have not only sped up the news cycle but have added new “vectors” that political analysts of all kinds have to take account of. In other words, instead of just paying attention to the New York Times and one or two political talk shows, everyone has to pay attention to Twitter as well, and to new sources of political content such as BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.

You could argue that the tendency for inconsequential or even irrelevant incidents to get blown out of proportion has increased thanks to Twitter and the appearance of “viral content” sites like BuzzFeed (which has been making a big push into the political sphere since it hired former Politico writer Ben Smith) and that is probably true. But then, such incidents also got blown out of proportion by television talk shows and news programs and newspaper columnists before blogs and Twitter and Facebook came along. In many ways, all those tools have done is speed up and enhance a process that has been under way for decades.

Irrelevant stories also burn out faster

During our conversation in June about social media and political coverage, Schiller also argued that the speed with which Twitter and other networks operate can be beneficial as well — since it can help defuse or tamp down an incorrect or ridiculous report that might otherwise have taken hours or even days to disprove through traditional media channels. As Byers noted in his story, the Romney comment might have turned into a multiple-day issue, as newspapers picked it up and it worked its way through the usual sources of political commentary, but instead it was mostly out of gas within a few hours. As reporter Sasha Issenberg put it:

“These little stories catch fire on Twitter more quickly than they did even with bloggers in 2008, but it also means that they burn out faster.”

There’s another element of Twitter and social media that could be beneficial during an election campaign, and that is the way that such tools allow for sources directly connected to events to comment and affect the news flow — something that could help alleviate the “pack journalism” effect that Jeff Jarvis and others have complained about, in which thousands of reporters congregate at a single event and repeat the same kinds of information over and over. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written about how social media can be an effective tool to combat this phenomenon during events such as the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere, because it allows other non-traditional sources to become part of the narrative.

This phenomenon of having “the sources go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has described it, is probably one of the biggest disruptive effects that Twitter has introduced into political journalism — and its impact, both positive and negative, is only going to become more obvious as the nation gets closer to the election. Whether it is primarily good or bad depends a lot on your perspective. Is it bad because there is more sound and fury that signifies nothing, or is it good because irrelevant stories burn themselves out more quickly and the sources of information have become broader?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Nils Geylen

Politics used to be a very controlled and almost theatrical process, with politicians and other political actors appearing in carefully scripted events — and the reporting and analysis of those events was also restricted to certain specific media channels: a couple of TV networks, one or two major newspapers, and so on. Now that we have blogs and Twitter and other forms of social media, how has that changed the nature of both the political process and the media reporting of that process? At paidContent 2012 in New York recently, I asked Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and NBC News digital head Vivian Schiller for their perspective on that question and you can hear their answers in the video embedded below.

Marshall, the editor and publisher of the ground-breaking political blog network, said that social media has really just accelerated the process of breaking down those traditional barriers — a process that started with the arrival of blogs about a decade ago:

I see it as a progression over the past dozen or so years, of a more and more frictionless news cycle, and what we’re today calling social media has just accelerated that. The other major transformation is an increase in key vectors in the news — the way the New York Times used to be a dominant vector in how news was propagated, along with the big TV networks and other big metropolitan dailies. With the growth of blogs and the beginnings of social media, you have a more fluid and unstable ecosystem of news.

Schiller, who was previously CEO at National Public Radio before joining NBC’s news division, said that for a media entity like NBC, social media has a way of amplifying the stories that come up in other formats. For three weeks in a row, she said, comments that politicians — including Cory Booker, Jamie Dimon and Joe Biden — made on the TV program Meet The Press became a national story thanks to the power of social media. “Meet The Press is about as old media as you can get,” said Schiller. “But those events ricocheted around the world — that’s social media.”

Both the panelists also said that one of the positive things about social media and its role in the news and political ecosystem is that some events that are trivial or unworthy of attention can “burn out” more quickly when they are exposed to the glare of Twitter and the blogosphere, whereas they might have taken on a life of their own and dominated the discussion in newspapers or on TV networks before social media. And Schiller said despite the fact that Twitter and other forms of social media can be filled with a lot of worthless noise, overall the impact has been positive for both politics and the media as a whole:

Of course there’s a lot of garbage in social media, but there’s a lot of garbage in every form of media, from the beginning of time. But I think that all of the kinds of access and the ways people can interact with content, for politics, it’s all good.

Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson has a pretty hot hand when it comes to investing in the social web, with stakes in leaders such as Twitter and Tumblr, but he hasn’t put money into anything that looks like a media company for some time. In an interview backstage following our chat at the recent paidContent 2012 conference in New York, I asked Wilson why that is, and he said it comes down to a number of factors: one is a lack of familiarity with the media business, but the other is a concern that traditional media companies don’t scale well — particularly when compared to user-generated content such as Twitter.

Wilson explained that in a previous incarnation as a venture capitalist, with the firm Flatiron Partners, he invested in a number of media-related startups, including financial analyst Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com, but those investments didn’t go well. It’s not that they failed, he said, but they just didn’t become the kind of blockbuster that makes a venture investment worthwhile for a large fund. Meanwhile, his investment in Geocities turned into a home run after the company was acquired by Yahoo for $3.6 billion:

So it was one of those things where this worked and this didn’t, so I want to do more of this and less of this. I think we were just out of our sweet spot — I’m not suggesting media is a bad place to invest, I just don’t think we knew what we were getting ourselves into

Wilson said that Union Square took one crack at something approaching the traditional media or content business by investing in Outside.in, which aggregated local data from a variety of sources. “We took a shot at the hyperlocal content business through a blog-aggregation model with Outside.in and that didn’t scale very well,” he said. “I think that hyperlocal media model is still one that has not been cracked.” Outside.in was ultimately acquired by AOL last year and folded into its Patch.com hyperlocal effort, which has also gotten a lot of criticism from investors and analysts for being a high-cost operation.

So where is the future of media? Wilson said he thinks it lies in working with emerging platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle and crowdfunding efforts such as Kickstarter — entities that are working on a different model that connects consumers directly with the producers of the content they want. Wilson said that if he was an editor with a publishing company who was good at finding and developing young writers, “maybe instead of working for a publishing house, I go and set up shop on top of the Amazon market or the Apple market or both.”

I don’t think the idea is that the editorial function or the venture capital function or the journalist function doesn’t happen any more, we just have to do them in the new place that they should be done, the more efficient place that they should be done.

Embedded below is a video of the on-stage interview I did with Wilson, in which he discussed the tech industry’s response to SOPA and PIPA — and how he believes that content owners have a public duty to provide access to their content in a variety of ways, because society helps enforce the copyright that they hold over that content.

Thinking of what they produce as information rather than content to be packaged, the Betaworks CEO said, puts the focus on the value of that information to users, and the package or delivery system — whether it’s a magazine or a newspaper or a mobile app — becomes secondary. Only that way can media companies figure out what and how their users want, he said.

The language drives the way you think about things, and since we’re dealing with a new media landscape, we need to redefine some of the words. For me, the moment you start thinking about it as information, you start to think less about the package and more about the users.

That need to understand what users want was the driving force behind two of the first services that Betaworks created, Borthwick said: Bit.ly started as a simple URL-shortener for social networks such as Twitter, but has become a tool that provides data about what links are shared and which ones are clicked on, and Chartbeat shows editors and writers what articles are getting the most engagement, but in real time rather than hours or days after they have been published. Chartbeat, he said, has become “like a Bloomberg terminal for editors.”

We wanted to understand the data and the “data exhaust” around publishing… to understand the tight loop between commenting, discovery and publishing, and the data helps inform that, but in real time Transforming publishing into real-time changes the nature of what you’re doing.

In order to appreciate that shift, content and media companies not only need to change the tools they are using, Borthwick said, but they have to fundamentally alter the way they think about the “content” business and what value they are ultimately adding for users.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

“I think those (traditional media) industries will survive and thrive, they just need to move from a fairly monopolistic distribution system to a wide open distribution system,” Wilson said.

He said while there are some examples of good collaboration between technology companies and progressive content owners, in most cases media companies fear the unfamiliar. But he said history continues to show that new technology — whether it’s radio, the VCR or iTunes — brings in new revenue. He predicts music subscription services will have the same effect.

In a perfect world, Wilson said he’d like to see a system similar to a DNS registry in which content owners would register their content and make it available with rules in exchange for copyright enforcement. That’s the fair compensation for society already enforcing the rights of copyright holders, he said.

“If we have rules for TV, films, music, books, games we’d see an explosion of innovation. All sorts of services and business models could get created,” he said.

If the media companies don’t adapt, tech companies and entrepreneurs are showing an increasingly willingness to create their own content. Wilson pointed to the original programing YouTube is commissioning. He said that could be where the next big media hit is.

“Some of those entrepreneurs will create fantastic content that will be very popular and we will see that become very profitable businesses. Maybe the next big media companies will be built that way,” Wilson said.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).