The Eric De La Cruz Case and Why Old Media is Dying

UPDATE: Veronica De La Cruz reported via Twitter that Eric was finally been admitted Sunday night to a hospital and is now being tested to see whether he can be listed as a candidate for a heart transplant.


Why is it that Facebook and Twitter are increasingly emerging as dominant forces in the media industry, while traditional institutions like The New York Times and the McClatchy Company are sputtering ever closer to a halt? There are many reasons, actually, but one key has long been visible right on the nytimes.com home page -- in the form of the link to its "most emailed" articles.

For anybody willing to adopt a data-driven approach to analyzing how to improve their media company's performance, the runaway popularity of that "most emailed" link provides a powerful bit of evidence.

What is a reader's first impulse when (s)he finds an article just too amazing and/or useful to keep to herself? She wants to share it. Friends share articles, colleagues do, too. Sharing information online is one of the ways we maintain connections with one another, though we may be separated by time, distance, and circumstance.

Sharing usually is an act of intimacy, of caring, although we've all had the experience of receiving material we'd prefer not seeing, as well. (In that case, it is more like the sender imposing his views on you -- this is particularly true in matters of religion and politics.)

Nevertheless, from the perspective of a media executive, this massive yearning to share content, sending it "viral," is one of the key elements of understanding the new media landscape.

So, let's consider Twitter. What's attractive about millions of people sharing trivialities about their daily lives in 140 characters or less? The answer is nothing. But that is the wrong question to ask about Twitter. What the micro-blogging platform actually presents is an elegant way for people to share news and information, and increasingly, to organize and wage campaigns to right wrongs.

In other words, Twitter (and in a similar vein, Facebook) are emerging as town squares for the global village. This is where people are opting to go to get the news out when something big happens in their lives or within their view.

The earthquakes in China. News broke over Twitter. That plane landing in the Hudson. News broke over Twitter. Those devastating wildfires in Australia -- Twitter again, and in this case, the service is credited with saving lives.

As we live and share our lives over an increasingly networked, geo-coded, mobile platform, many of our old assumptions have to die. Like any early media form, there is plenty of trash, let's politely call it noise, on Twitter. But, signal tends to rise out of that noise, sometimes with impressive speed and clarity of purpose.

A little over a week ago, a relatively unknown Internet correspondent for CNN in New York City named Veronica De La Cruz turned to Twitter in desperation.

Her 27-year-old brother, Eric, was nearing death from a rare heart condition in Nevada. The family couldn't break through all of the red tape that characterizes the U.S. health care system to get him evaluated for what could be a life-saving heart transplant.

Veronica connected with various people using Twitter who have tens of thousands of "followers." One was a guy who goes by the name "The Expert." Normally, this guy does 30 second stand-up comedy videos, and over the course of a few weeks, he's built up a following from nothing to over 20,000 people as of a few moments ago.

Turns out, like many comedians, this guy has a huge heart, so when he learned of the De La Cruz family's ordeal, he went to work alerting his network, which contains some of the true Twitter giants, people with many hundreds of thousands of followers.

The initial appeal from Veronica De La Cruz was to ask people to write members of Congress to pressure for help with her brother's case, and over the course of the past week, this may have worked, because some of the red tape preventing Eric from being evaluated for a heart transplant has been snipped away.

But, among those who found out about the case from Twitter was Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. The rock group, on a long national tour with Jane's Addiction, has started raising money for the De La Cruz family, and at latest count, has brought in over $650,000.

Sadly, although he has gotten several steps closer to being admitted to UCLA hospital for evaluation, as of a few hours ago, Eric still was being refused entrance. The details are hard to sort out, as are facts about his current medical condition.

The effort over Twitter to save Eric De La Cruz continues to expand while we collectively wait to see whether it will succeed. But I can't help but think that whatever the outcome, his plight has ignited a firestorm among millions around this country who feel so poorly served by our present health care system. If so, it will be the actions of this past week at Twitter that historians will cite as the moment Americans started to organize a serious movement for reform.

Meanwhile, where is traditional media? So far, hardly showing up. The top link on Google if you search for "Eric De La Cruz" is not a major media company but yours truly, just one obscure blogger.

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