Watertown Shootout Redefines Breaking News; Twitter Citizen Journalists Hours Ahead of Cable Networks

By now we’ve all grown accustomed to Twitter being the primary news feed for major world events. Whether it being a royal wedding or the Arab Spring, Twitter was there step by step for real time coverage.

In the case of the raid and subsequent killing of Osama Bin Laden, we saw Twitter prove its worth in comparison to mainstream media. At the same time Navy Seals were storming the compound, a local Pakistani resident was live tweeting about helicopters flying overhead. Unbeknownst to him, he was in fact providing up to the minute coverage of the military operation.

This brings us to the current unfolding events in Watertown, Ma. After news broke on Twitter that a shooting had taken place on campus at MIT, the story went viral. As tweets came in detailing that a campus police officer was shot after responding to a disturbance on campus, it became abundantly clear that the big cable news networks were completely blind to the unfolding events.

The MIT shooting soon blossomed a car jacking, then a high speed chase coupled with gunfire and explosives being hurled at the pursuing police officers. All the while Fox News, CNN and MSNBC were all showing regularly scheduled programs.

Twitter in the meantime was getting bombarded with personal accounts from users in the vicinity of the shootout. One user, Andrew Kitzenberg @AKitz even posted a series photos from his home of the manhunt still in progress.

https://twitter.com/AKitz/status/325112012805918720

By the time CNN and the like had clued in it was no longer ‘Breaking News’, that were at least an hour behind the trending topic on Twitter.

As of this writing it is believed that the suspects from the MIT shooting are also responsible for the Marathon bombing. At last report one of the suspects was shot and pronounced dead at the hospital. The other suspect was still at large with a massive man hunt underway.

I was able to gather the majority of the information for this post before the cable news networks, just by following a few hashtags. It makes you wonder why no one at a major network was doing the same. Perhaps they got word of it, but chose an abundance of caution, so as to not misreport a rapidly developing story.

One thing is for sure, tonight marks a major turning point for real time news coverage. Twitter’s citizen journalists left the billion dollar cable news networks in the dust.

You can follow me here: @KevinMinott