Osama Bin Laden s death was officially announced by President Obama on Sunday night, but word of it first got out to most people via Twitter. Keith Urbahn, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld s chief of staff, unwittingly became the first to break the news.
Twitter is not in and of itself a news source, writes Erick Schonfeld. Whoever is Tweeting is the source. But all it takes is one person to Tweet out news for it to spread faster than through any other medium. The person doesn t have to be a journalist. Urbahn scooped everyone.
Twitter can work as an amplifier of traditional media. People were Tweeting at a rate of 4,000 Tweets per second during the president s announcement, near an all time high.
Twitter also drives people to traditional media. Last night, news that the President was going to make a surprise announcement certainly drove people to TV. For instance, I first heard about the news conference on Twitter, and then I turned on CNN. Much of what people were Tweeting was what they were hearing on TV, thus passing the news instantly to people who may not have been in front of a TV at the time, noted Schonfeld. But what that means in practice is that if you are following the right people, you don t have to actually turn on your TV. You can learn most of the salient facts from watching your Twitter stream. It can be such an efficient way to get information that people mistake it for the source of the news itself. For an increasing number of people, it is becoming the first place they turn to find out what is going on. However, it also points to other media (much like a news search does) and people click on those links to find out more.
Source: Tech Crunch
