Whole world was plugged on to the internet and television to catch up with the Mumbai terrorist attack on Thursday. CNN and all other news channels were capturing every movement of several witnesses, hostages and even military personnel that were live at the scene and their updates every hour. However, social media networks showed the minute to minute updates. I was glued to my laptop using twitter and following the Twitter user that got live feed from the location.

In fact, live-blogging events were so instantaneous that Mumbai police had to step in and ask several live bloggers and Twitterers to leave. According to the police they were disturbing the military operations to scare the terrorists and rescue the hostages. Apparently, the terrorists were using the live Internet feeds to pinpoint the location of police determined to stop them.

According to Wikipedia, CNN airs to more than 1.5 billion people in over 212 countries and territories. Impressive, but the Internet has a wider reach and faster growth. So what about on-the-ground reporters? CNN is apparently second only to Britain’s BBC News in terms of the number of employed news journalists and worldwide news bureaus. There are undoubtedly more people blogging the news in better and faster ways than CNN journalists.

More and more people are switching from their newspaper subscription, switching off the TV and moving to the Internet to get their daily news dose. And why shouldn’t they? It’s faster, cheaper and interactive. They can subscribe to the feeds of digital journalists and bloggers they like, they can search news by region, category or timeline and thanks to social networking, can be informed the very instant news happens in the world.

So could the advent of social media signal the end of traditional news journalism? Yes, I think it could. We’ve already seen how the Internet has impacted newspaper publishing.