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The shift in news gathering and distribution that has taken place over the past few years has taken another turn with the introduction of Twitter Lists. Users are allowed to personalize the way they digest news and events by filtering them through the multiple lenses of the people they follow on Twitter. Curiously, there are quite a few parallels to the structure that Twitter Lists are taking to the traditional breakdown of news, and so users will find lists of current events, politics, sports, local news, etc., and probably organize their own lists along these somewhat familiar lines. The big difference is that because Twitter is so heavily focused on the personal ("What are you doing?"), the feeds from lists are peppered with personal opinion, random happenings, and decidedly off-topic musings.

Things will get quite interesting as more and more people begin to use Twitter as their initial entry into finding and digesting news. Rather than beginning the day by hitting a cycle of major news sites and blogs, users will simply check their lists. However, while Twitter is organized synchronously according to the latest tweets, the tweets themselves may contain asynchronous content. This makes discovery much more serendipitous than browsing the front page of the Times, for example.

It will be interesting to watch how traditional media outlets adapt to this change. An unspoken side of this is that lists will offer Twitter an obvious way to monetize their service, serving up ads that are topically related to lists. I can only imagine that this will further impact the ad revenue that primary news sources can generate. Thankfully, Twitter’s 140 character limit restricts a tweet to a link and a pithy remark, and so primary sources are still necessary. For now.