Media coverage? I haven't seen anything about Twitter on the New York Times or CNN or any other media outlet targeted at "the average person". Even mainstream-leaning "tech" sites like Wired or CNet haven't been covering the outages/scaling problems.

People who read sites like TechCrunch most definitely know what Twitter is, and coverage that talks about why they have scaling problems as opposed to making a soap opera about it is very useful for that demographic.