Yesterday's NYC plane crash into the Hudson River was BIG news, with images being smattered all over CNN, Fox News, etc. But who had the scoop? Who had the very first photos of the crash? Sorry kids, it wasn't our silver fox Anderson Cooper, it was Twitter!
Thanks to the popularity of the micro-blogging site, the news of the crash spread quicker than reporters could get on the scene. A Twitter-user on a nearby ferry snapped a pic with his iPhone (brief sigh of envy) and sent it to the photo application called TwitPic. The tweet read: "http://twitpic.com/135xa - There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."Freep.com reported that the picture spread around the social networking world so fast that it crashed the site when 7,000 people tried to view it at once. Amazing.
Ok ok... so Twitter isn't necessarily a news source per say, but Twitter and other frequently updated social networking sites are beginning to become a staple source of information for many who opt out of checking their newspaper in the early morning for the news. And with traditional media faltering on the scene, perhaps it's time to take a closer look at what social media can do for the communications world.
2 comments:
It also begs the question: What role do professional reporters need to take on now? Also, is the general public taking on that role to the point where they may become the sought after "experts"? This is not just about the medium, but the author as well.
I totally use twitter as a news source. It seems like every day I learn something new (some big things, some small) through a friends' tweet.
Often I'll hear "breaking news" later that night on TV and I will have already read about it earlier that day because I found out about it on twitter!
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