In case you missed it, the New York Times has picked up the Kiva story. What I’m struck by is:
- The story was broken by David Roodman in his original blog post.
- How quickly the conversation spread online, including response by Kiva to the blog posts and changes to their website.
- The analysis is definitely deeper online than in the Times story, which almost feels like a story about the story.
- It took more than a MONTH from the time David wrote his post until the Times picked it up.
- For all the blogging/Tweeting buzz about the story, there’s been no real impact on giving to Kiva, which makes me think that the online conversation was really “inside baseball” and that the Times story will be what reaches 99% of Kiva’s donors.
Blogging and tweeting all have a role to play, and for some things it’s clearly where the deeper conversations happen. But we also can fool ourselves into thinking that just because everything we read is talking about something, then everyone knows about it.
It’s true only as long as you know who you mean by “everyone.”