It seems that in the quest to deliver news quicker, social networks are outpacing traditional media outlets.

Now you could say that there's an element of sampling bias here. After all, I check social networking sites more often that news sites in the course of a day.

Even if it's true that I am biased slightly, the ability of social networks to propagate information quickly represents one of the greatest threats to the viability of the mainstream media as it stands.

The power of social networks to trump the news media was amply illustrated by the recent Trafigura case. As little as two decades ago, The Sunday Times' Insight team were legendary for exposes such as the secret Israeli nuclear programme.

But this was a time when newspapers could throw huge amounts of money at investigative journalism. Such largesse was necessary to sustain investigations that could last months or even years.

Those days are long gone and the importance of investigate journalism has diminshed. So when The Guardian's reporting of Trafigura's activities was suppressed by a superinjunction, their editorship chose not to publish and be damned.

The nature of this move meant that they couldn't even report the existence of any legal action against them. This contrasts sharply with the Spycatcher case.

The Thatcher Government blew £3 million over two and a half years in an effort to stop publication of that infamous tome. But their efforts were undone by newspapers such as The Sunday Times publishing extracts of the book. The fact that the book was freely available outside the UK didn't help either.

In the present day, newspapers such as The Guardian are far more wary of breaching the law and bringing the ire of establishment down upon them. The financial health of the news media is precarious enough as it is without inviting punitive sanctions such as fines and libel awards.

But when news of the superinjunction spilled onto Twitter, Trafigura rapidly became the number one trending topic. The oxygen of publicity rapidly made their legal action moot and Trafigura caved in to pressure.

Whilst The Guardian were vulnerable to litigation, the masses on Twitter were never in such danger. The company behind Twitter could evade the issue of liability by saying that their service is unmoderated and therefore more akin to a common carrier like a postal service than a news outlet.

Never mind the logistics of pursuing thousands of Twitter users through the courts. It is this fundamental difference between social networks and traditional media that is slowly undermining the status quo.

Social networks may be fast and pervasive but news outlets have the upper hand for now in terms of their breadth and depth of reporting. Bloggers howl loudly when their ability to report the news is impugned.

The fact is that the blogosphere has a long way to go before it can match traditional media in terms of depth and accuracy. However it is only matter of time before this starts to change.

Traditional media is constrained by financial reality. Newspapers are closing all over the world and not enough new publications are springing up to replace them.

The blogosphere is not subject to these limitations. In time, bloggers will become more professional and this will sound the death knell for news media as we know it.

In many ways, news outlets are in the same position as the music industry was a few years ago. The ability to share music online with ease has been categorised as a 'disruptive' technology.

Even though the music industry was well aware of this new technology, they hemmed and hawwed while Apple outmanoeuvred them to become the world's largest distributor of digital music.

Traditional media is now being similarly disrupted. Complacency by the industry will only lead to further decline.

This is one piece of bad news that doesn't travel fast as far as the news media is concerned.