I first heard about the Mumbai attacks from my friend’s Facebook status. Shortly thereafter I received a tweet about a #Mumbai channel and checked out photos on Flickr from the scene. Recently many bloggers and news agencies have been touting social media’s role in covering the tragic events. Twitter often broke news before traditional news media and CNN even reached out to a few twitterers for interviews.
It wasn’t perfect by any means. The #Mumbai channel was full of re-tweets (people just forwarding on information) and other useless tweets. But, for someone like me who likes to sift through large amounts of information, the on-scene twitterers provided great details. Some contrarians are downplaying social media’s role in the events by making the distinction between data and actual, reliable, news reporting. While they make a valid point, the growing following and influence of bloggers and twitterers during major news events is hard to ignore.
What is certain is that new social media sources will only continue to grow in importance as more tools emerge to intelligently distill the most valuable data from new social media sources.
