You wake up one morning and realize there’s a shooting a shooting at a college or that there’s a bombing at the Boston Marathon. It’s not CNN or Fox that picks it up first but the people at the street and delivering news through Twitter.
Granted, well established news organizations have recognized the importance of Twitter in distributing information. Take the recent NBA trade deadline on February 18th. On the NBA subreddit, an user composed a master trade list through Twitter sources. More formal sources like nba.com or ESPN released this information later in the day.
This begs the question – is formal news too slow to catch up with the media age? The main flaw that Twitter induced news are not as legitimate as established news sources. If the masses, however, are able to correct this flaw, do we need news organizations anymore?
