If you're an obsessive consumer of news and how its reported, the earth tremor that shook most of residential Melbourne and surrounds last night almost undoubtedly proved the growing irrelevancy of the printed media. Within 10 minutes of it occurring, 12 of my friends on my Facebook had reported it in their status. (Some with accompanying "It's the end of the world" comment, which had me lamenting that Carl Sagan might actually be right and that these people never paid attention during their Geography classes) With a turnaround of 12 hours as opposed to a propagation speed of minutes or even seconds, major events reporting will soon be the domain of internet-enabled citizens with newspapers taking a more supporting role such as analysis or criticism of the event rather than direct reporting. A compiler of citizen-originated event reporting could even be achieved using some sort of rudimentary tagging system. Even then its hard to figure that anyone will bother to read that, either.