New media too speedy to outflank

It began as a scattering of acid remarks within earshot of a Rolling Stone reporter. But - thanks in large part to Twitter, the Web, and cable news - barely two days after those remarks were disclosed, a media firestorm ended Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's tenure as commander of U.S. and NATO Coalition Forces in Afghanistan.

Fast, overwhelming, decisive: It's a case study in how tightly connected 21st-century media can whip a story into a full-on tsunami, with startling consequences for individual careers and national policy.

"Rolling Stone broke the story, but it was Twitter that got the story rolling," says Aram Sinnreich, a media professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. "The peer-produced social media are doing to cable-news networks what cable news did to broadcast. We've gone from the one-day news cycle to every hour on the hour to second by second."

Noah Shachtman, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a blogger at Wired magazine, says: "The fact so many of us are networked together enabled the information to spread speed-of-light fast. That turned what might have been a slower-burning flame into an instant conflagration."

How fast? The Rolling Stone article that started it all, Michael Hastings' "The Runaway General," in which McChrystal's team disparages Obama administration officials, doesn't hits newsstands until today.

With the story already yesterday.

On Monday, Rolling Stone spokesman Mark Neschis leaked the story to the Associated Press, which ran an article about one aspect of the story - McChrystal's ire at U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry - that was circulated on the Internet.

Then Twitter took over. Andrea Mitchell, NBC's chief foreign-affairs correspondent, tweeted: "Rolling Stone quotes Gen McChrystal says Amb(ret Gen) Eikenberry 'betrayed' him with leaked memo last yr doubting Karzai story is out fri."

The rest of the story came out, and soon McChrystal was scoring high on Twitter's Trending list, meaning that lots of people all over the world were firing 140-character tweets about it. (As of Wednesday night, McChrystal was No. 10, behind such hot topics as the World Cup, Wimbledon, and the love life of actress Ana Maria Braga.)

By the nightly TV news Monday, McChrystal was a top story. All this time, hundreds of blogs and news sites were dissecting and debating. Late Monday, the influential website Politico carried a Laura Rozen blog that was commented on and relayed by thousands of readers.