Its amazing the kneejerk reaction that everybody has been having to the role that social media served in all of this. Fast news is not reliable, and everybody was just reporting what they heard on the police scanner, and that's not journalism. Personally I like my news fast, and then an after-action report to get all of the facts right.
I like my news slow and accurate. The only exception is if it is directly effecting me (if I were in Boston for example). Not to say that either of these is right or wrong though. I just don't trust everyone to read the "after-action report", instead they will go on thinking they know what happened when they don't.
When The Internet shines it's often very much through the act of fact checking and editing, though. Reddit, Twitter, etc, didn't have the right design for enabling this virtue on Friday, though. On Reddit there's a character limit on the size of "self" posts, so the "live update" threads had to keep being restarted. It was just a mess--history was being buried, the noise ratio in the comments was disgusting, the number of comments were jumping by 400-500 every 3 minutes. And, of course, now I feel like I'm making a case to design and build something that's adapted for collecting, corroborating, checking, and editing news during fast-moving events with mass attention and participation. Stack Exchange for journalism or something like that.
I was listening to a scanner feed, and every time the cops said ANYTHING there would be like 20-30 people commenting what was said. But later that day, they were pretty much handing out awards to the people who ran those threads and "kept people informed and safe". They're hoisting them up as heroes, and all they did was transcribe a police scanner feed word for word... that's it. Don't get me wrong, it was nice someone was making a time line of events, but was it journalism? No. Was it reporting? No. Was it investigative? No. Was it accurate? Mostly, no. But was it fast? YES. I just go to those threads for the scanner feeds and then leave, because it's just a cluster-fuck of comments. I really don't get why that community thinks listening to a scanner feed and typing exactly what they hear makes them the best form of news on the planet. I really don't get the "Reddit does a better job at reporting than all the other news networks" circle-jerk. It's grand standing, self entitled, and horribly misplaced. If it wasn't for the scanner feeds, they'd have absolutely nothing. Think about that.the noise ratio in the comments was disgusting
And, of course, now I feel like I'm making a case to design and build something that's adapted for collecting, corroborating, checking, and editing news during fast-moving events with mass attention and participation. Stack Exchange for journalism or something like that.
This point was raised during the reddit mess -- why doesn't something like this exist? Combine a feature like "twitter news" with a forum-style ui where anyone can input, then add some fact checkers. Force tv news like CNN to change a bit to stay abreast with the market, and we might have a new dawn of investigative news journalism.
@AlderaanDuran used the term "time line" in the other comment and it made me wonder if you can make a timeline the central part of a crowd-reporting UI. Varying levels of zoom, attach events anywhere, some kind of consensus mechanism for moving events up or down in history or relevance as more accurate information comes in. Tablet hardware is perfect for this kind of thing, since moving through timelines and zooming in/out is much more intuitive and faster on touchscreens.