Kinda sorry I missed meeting Om Malik at LeWeb3, also missed meeting him at a NewTeeVee gathering here a couple of months ago - oh well, things come in three's and maybe I'll have another chance soon.  

Anyway, in a post on  Conversation Agent today -New Media GigaOM Om Malik's Reporting Better Than WSJ it's said that Om Malik's report is better than Main Stream Media reporting that supposedly done by expert reporters.

But that's to be expected as bloggers who are authorities can be micro focused in areas that Newspapers can't be, as much - and can act much faster than a Newspaper, because Om Malik, in this case, is his own editor, and has connections with many, many sources, more than most reporters, for his subject matter, which is wireless technology, broadband, etc.

"..This is not the first time Om Malik does a tremendous job reporting on technology. He had a great post on the Skype Outage a few months back, one that clearly demonstrated a greater passion for the topic than traditional media. As was the case back in August with 41 comments for the Skype post, his coverage of the Verizon news was rewarded by 18 and 61 comments respectively. The reason for the comments is two-fold:

• Om Malik has built a reputation of swift and easy to understand coverage for technical news
• The community of GigaOM readers is just as passionate about the topic as the writer and they will support each other in the discussion

This is a hard lesson to take for news writers who are used to thinking that the coverage is done when the post is written. With new media, that is only the beginning. As Malik demonstrated with the Verizon story, there was opportunity to come back to it with further implications after the initial announcement. In his first post early in the day, Malik terms this as "a huge announcement: akin to Mikhail Gorbachev responding to President Ronald Reagen’s call to bring down the walls."

I suppose one might say the well connected, read blogs such as GigaOM and TechCrunch are replacing mainstream media as authoritative sources of news related to Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and most things in between.