Citizen journalism and the Hudson Plane Crash

The net is all aflutter about how twitter and TwitPic were the first to report the plane crash (I mean ditch) in the Hudson yesterday. Wikinomics has a reasonable summary, Citizen journalism and the Hudson Plane Crash "If there was any doubt before, yesterday’s plane crash in the Hudson river provided ample proof of how useful Twitter can be for emerging news"

At least the title was technology agnostic. I think Twitter is just the site-of-the-day for this stuff. But at least they seem past many of their stability problems. If this had happened a year ago, Twitter would have crashed too.

Twitter lets you broadcast short messages to people who follow you. As a reader you can see the tweets of people you follow, or all the tweets that everyone writes (or just search them for a particular phrase).

I first heard about the crash on Twitter. davewiner wrote "This just in: Plane crash on Hudson. Plane crash on Hudson. Plane crash on Hudson. Plane crash on Hudson. Plane crash on Hudson!!!" I replied to him "really, once is enough".

I'm not sure Twitter is adding much aside from a little more immediacy. I saw the tweets and then turned on CNN to see some details. Me knowing about this via Twitter a few minutes sooner isn't really that important. I liked this observation too: "I love how our earliest news is most certainly going to contain typos from now on".

Yes, being able to report an event quicker and even take pictures of it is a good thing. But I think that's provided by camera phones and pervasive wireless internet. It's not Twitter so much, it's the hardware.

Then again, there are some nice things happening. A few twitter accounts specialize in what they report and often retweet related things by others. BostonTweet has stuff about Boston and 02138now has stuff specific to Harvard Square. Even Logan Airport has a twitter account, BOS. This makes it easy to subscribe to news specific to you. And while 140 bytes doesn't allow for long messages, it's more than enough for headlines, and I've read too many newspaper articles that didn't add much to the headline.

Maybe it's not the immediacy that's important. Maybe it's the fact that everyone can now report something and post photos of it from wherever they are and people can manageably consume it. Chowhound and Yelp are now the way I find out about restaurants. I haven't read a newspaper restaurant review in a quite a while. I pick hotels from tripadvisor reviews not AAA guidebooks.

I didn't check wikinews for the plane crash but their first report was at 3:50pm ET and the short article already has over 500 edits. Maybe if it wasn't so painful to type on a phone people would want to type more than 140 bytes. I also suspect that many of those 500 edits fixed typos; probably grammar mistakes too.