Update: Appears that Karthik S had written about this product last month, when it was known as Raw News. He raises some issues related to the importance of bylines and the publication vs the journalist. My take: with publishing and distribution being a commodity online, you don't really have a choice. Indiatimes appears to have recently launched SpeedNews for Times of India. SpeedNews is a quick read interface that allows reporters to publish short updates from cities across India. This is essentially taking the Twitter concept, and reworking it to suit a media house model, by combining the freshness of recent updates with the brevity of mobile limits (thankfully not SMS lingo), with geography and categorization. The geography and categorization allows users to search for city specific news, or the latest updates according to Business, Crime, Entertainment, Politics, Sports, and General news. This product should allow a lot more news to be surfaced rather quickly, perhaps even content that doesn't necessarily make it to articles. For example, in the screenshot below, you'll see a quick message from a journalist about a city specific event.It does appear as if the content is going through an editorial desk, though. This works rather well for someone looking for the latest updates for city specific news, and could well become a primary source of accessing news on timesofindia.com itself. They need to work on collecting more news, though: couldn't find any news for Aurangabad. It's also good to see that the journalists on Speed…
