We Are Our Own News Media

This has been lurking in my reading list. . . Something that was particularly remarkable (but not new) about the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers was the role private individual and coporate social media played in distributing news about the incident real time. (The first such application of social media that I can remember was the use of Twitter in sharing information about the January 2009 crash of US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River.)

See this story in the Harvad Gazette -- 

Your own news platform

Technological advances show great promise, some peril in chronicling marathon manhunt

April 22, 2013 | Editor's Pick 

By Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer money.msn.com

During the massive manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, millions of people around the world watched television news crews as they conveyed the latest bits of information from the perimeter of the search zone.

But Harvard Professor David Liu was tuned into UStream, a website where anyone can share his or her own video. Someone had pointed a camera at a scanner that was tuned to Boston police radio traffic, and was streaming the audio and video onto the Internet. It wasn’t visually interesting, but the audio during the manhunt was riveting.

While traditional media sources, at the request of police, refrained from reporting information gleaned from the scanners, more than 250,000 people worldwide were tuned in to the UStream channel, listening to police and FBI agents gathered near a boat in a Watertown backyard. The listeners heard officers discussing the suspect’s every movement, as well as talk of flashbang grenades, the boat’s 40-gallon fuel tank, where to focus a helicopter’s spotlight, and when to bring in the negotiation team.

Article continues at link.