Explosion in Toronto - Twitter is Where the News Happens

"This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are."

For a huge explosion, sure.

I'm not convinced the argument applies for anything more nuanced than "something go big boom".

"This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are."

Let's see. I'm on Twitter, follow ~100 people, have not seen a single post about Toronto.

I read Google News main page, see stuff about explosion in Toronto.

Conclusion: Twitter works for breaking news if you are prescient enough to follow people who are going to be where news happens, when it happens, and you check it quite often.

"This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are."

Completely absent from the tweets and videos: what exactly happened? Why? What was the outcome? Any loss of life?

You can take your 140-character instant uninformed man on the street reactions and keep 'em for all I'm concerned.

I was on my way home when the explosion happened. I live about 12km away, but felt and heard it enough to comment to my friend that it seemed like a big explosion. About 5 minutes later I saw a helicopter heading in that direction, so I made a mental note to check on things in the morning.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, by the time I woke up (11-ish) the story was all over Google News. And it honestly never occurred to me to check Twitter. The first place I actually checked was blogTO.

So, maybe this demonstrates that the web has changed news, but I'm not sure it says anything about Twitter. Did anyone see stuff on Twitter before other sites?

Mainstream media is far from the best, but they tend to at least gloss over the cause of the explosions, whether people were hurt, and so on.

The commentary we got from what was posted went something like "Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god."

Twitter isn't really a competitor to the mainstream media, however what it may become -- if the mainstream media catches on -- is an early warning system of sorts. There are lots of eyes on it, and the news channels could possibly keep an eye on it to figure out where to send reporters.

The last thing I thought of was to go on twitter. :)

Upmodded for the dose of reality provided by the blog post's comments...

@alex_c and @jamesbritt You have valid points, but I think in the wrong context. The magic here starts to happen when you are aggregating many disparate people's twits. Using the summize/twitter search for a particular term or region works very well. In this case, I caught on to what happened in Toronto a few hours ago from a twit I saw. As I looked deeper into it, none of the mainstream news channels were covering it, while there were dozens of twits about it. Some of them linked to several Youtube videos, one of which I included in the post.

I'm not the only one to notice the breaking news Twitter effect in general. Arrington and others have posted about it as well. I just find it disturbing that something that big happens and over 12 hours later, its doesn't even have a blip on the "mainstream" news. God forbid it was something more widespread than this accident. Instead, we get to watch more celebrity coverage, and then 3 hours of talking heads yammering about said-celebrity(s).