We all know I’m just slightly biased regarding the supremacy of The New York Times. But in spite of that, let me just pose the following question: does any other news site create such incredible interactive graphs as NYTimes.com?

The above is a representation of how Americans spend their time, displayed on a minute-by-minute basis. The graph can be parsed by gender, race, employment status, age, education and number of children.

I’m constantly amazed by the creativity, artistry and genius behind the NYT interactive graphs (which I’ve blogged about before). But this kind of ingenious graphical representation takes supreme smarts and, ostensibly, cash. Thus, creations like the one above provide yet another reason to cross our fingers and hope that larger newspaper/media companies like the NYT stick around for a long, long time, as without them, this sort of invention could never be financed.

-Elise

Brian Stelter’s article on the front page of The New York Times foregrounds the integral role social media site Twitter is playing for Iranians during the current election aftermath.

Amidst a tumultuous political atmosphere, where authorities have blocked text-messaging on cell phones and journalistic websites, Twitter has emerged as an invaluable way for Iranian citizens to swap information about protests and demonstrations. In a remarkable move, recognizing Twitter’s invaluable role, the US State Department asked the site to postpone its scheduled maitenance in order to maintain this conduit of information for those in Iran.

This entire chain of events is fascinating to me, from the politics itself to the foregrounding of social media, and is a powerful example of how the Internet frontier—with the democritization of information and access that many seem to decry—can be an incredibly powerful venue, one that may even enable social and political movements.

In addition, Twitter has become a funnel for videos of protests and information about the elections, information otherwise banned from leaving the country. At a time when many feel the decline of print newspapers will degrade the quality of journalism, the internet—Twitter and YouTube, specifically—have filled the gaps in news-gathering that bans on traditional journalism have created. Revolutions every which way.

-Elise