Fastest to report sometimes breaking and often making the news

1. Fastest to report sometimes breaking and often making the news

2. The mass media picked up this story from Twitter

3. Plane Crash in Amsterdam The plane crash just outside Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam broke first on Twitter, the popular micro blogging service. Jonathan Nip, who lived near the scene of the accident, was one of the first to tweet about the crash. “Looking at a crashed aeroplane near Schiphol,” he wrote just moments after the plane came down. “A lot of emergency services rushing to the scene,” he updated, a few minutes later. “Still no more info. Can’t find any info on the net.” It’s the last part of that tweet that’s interesting, because it underlines the shifting dynamic of breaking news. Here was an eyewitness to an event who was able to broadcast the latest information far quicker than traditional broadcasters could. The internet, which Jonathan Nip usually relies on for news and facts, was being outpaced by his own direct experiences, which he in turn was sharing with the world via the medium of Twitter. And from there, the news snowballed across the Twitterverse, the blogosphere and social networks. Hundreds of tweets carrying the identifying “hash tag” of #Schiphol began rolling in to Twitter. TwitPic, the third-party service used by many Twitter members to post pictures, was used to share images of the downed jet. One photo, taken by Twitter user Diederik M, has already been viewed more than 72,000 times.

4. Miracle on the Hudson 15/01/09 – Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, a skilled former USAF fighter pilot who landed US Airways #1549 on the Hudson River in New York after birds flew into the plane’s engines causing them to stall. Sully managed to successfully guide the plane in a textbook water landing (assuming there is such a thing), avoided Manhattan, saved the lives of everyone on board, then assisted the crew in evacuating more than 150 people to safety. Many first learned of the story from Twitter. The first photo after the incident emerged via TwitPic from Janis Krums who witnessed it and tweeted while aboard the ferry that was on its way to retrieve the passengers and the crew. • The mass media picked up this story from Twitter

5. Tiger Woods 27/11/09 – Yet again, it was TMZ, the Los Angeles based celebrity gossip site that beat out all the other outlets by reporting that Tiger’s injuries were not caused by a car accident while behind the wheel of his SUV but rather “were inflicted by his wife, ElinNordegren.” According to reports, she and Tiger were arguing after she had learned about his extramarital affair with Rachel Uchitel (as well as others, we’d learn about later) and an altercation ensued. In the absence of actual B-roll footage to visually support the story, a Taiwanese news station used animation to dramatically reenact the event during their broadcast. Though it’s in Chinese, the images seem quite realistic and probably not too far off from what actually happened that night. • The online media took this story to a ‘new level’ with an online re-enactment seen by thousands on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i5FlC1MpkE&feature=player_embedded

6. A legal injunction from the High Court in London and designed to gag The Guardian newspaper was ‘de facto’ overturned by the power of the crowd as social media communities turned on lawyers Carter Ruck and the villains of the piece Trafigura http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8304908.stm

7. An unholy alliance between the old media and the Twittersphere simply blew away the legal and conventional efforts to silence an unwelcome business story http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook