Remember how for a while there everyone was complaining about how magazines were shortening their articles in order to keep the reader interested and we were all in the process of developing the attention spans of four-year-old because of MTV or the like? Well the future has officially come to pass! You guessed it, the Twitter.

In a very short period of time it has taken over much of the media landscape, in 140 character bits. The biggest user? Barack Obama, natch. But media outlets are on the rise. To wit: CurrentTV is planning on including twitters from viewer in its broadcast cast of all four presidential debates (actually they’re inviting you to “hack the debates”). And CNN’s Rick Sanchez recently used it to cover Hurricane Gustav. But is it the future of newspapers?

Not according to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

I don’t think it will ever replace newspapers. We will always need a medium that carries more words and explores a topic in a greater detail. We will always need more journalistic research. We will always need video and images. Twitter doesn’t replace any of those things. But it complements them quite well. [However] Twitter provides a great man-on-the-street account of what’s happening right now…Twitter is very good at immediacy.