Do you have your finger on the pulse of the media landscape?

You know what I like? Pretty pictures. Especially pretty pictures that explain things.

So, when everyone says “the media is changing,” or “everything is happening online today,” or “it’s all about targeting specific communities,” I ask: says who? Sure, you have numbers (growing web traffic, fragmented and niche audiences, booming social networks, etc.), but I can’t take all this number stuff – give me a picture!

Well, the new head of the NYT Bits Blog, @nickbilton, did. And, he said he would too.

What he did was connect with the research guys at the New York Times – those guys who turn their nose up at pretty pictures and eat numbers & data 3 meals a day – and put together a global graph of NYT.com web traffic in a single day, condensing it into about 90 seconds. Well, not just any day, but a rather unique day from a web traffic perspective: June 25, 2009. Or, the day Michael Jackson died. Ya know, the same day Twitter went down?

Bilton uses this data to create a sort of global news consumption pulse. It’s staggering. It truly feels like you’re watching a living thing. And, not to get in over my head, but aren’t we? It’s an interactive map that shows we’re all connected. It’s specific to NYT.com, but it could be any news site or online destination.

The New York Times site traffic, World View, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

So, as you watch the world wake up in different time zones and consume their news, at 5:20 pm ET, you see a flash: the news breaks, and everyone rushes to their computers or iPhones. It’s jarring – the entire world reacting at once. Powerful stuff.

While this was an utterly unique news occurrence – one that probably won’t replicate itself for another few years, at least – what it does is amplify what we say every day: the way people consume their news is changing. But, when you put it in pictures (or, video in this case), you begin to feel it a bit more.