Tweets eclipsing some print newspapers?

I was at a fellows retreat in May and an interesting factoid was presented to the group during a bar-style trivia game.

We were asked: What is larger? The average number of Tweets posted in one hour or the daily circulation (M-F) of The Washington Post and The New York Times combined?

Your guess might depend on your age. The answer, if you follow the links above, is Twitter. The livestreaming social networking tool clocks about 1.8 million Tweets per hour while 1.53 million print copies of the two major metro newspapers are circulated daily.

What does that kind of number tell us about our news and information dissemination habits? I would guess a lot of our Tweeting includes information found in those newspapers.

What do you Tweet and how often?

According to this funny graphic of the Social Media Mullet, Twitter is all party in the back while LinkedIn is business in the front. However this is not the case for me. First, I never check my LinkedIn account, but I rely on Twitter for business and new-journalism networking (I am a former newspaper reporter and I am a media policy fellow studying ideas about the future of news). And I find Twitter connects me to well vetted information supplied by the people I follow. You could say Twitter "circulation" has replaced traditional newspaper circulation today.