Twitter made news again following the death of Osama bin Laden. One of the circulating stories was about Sohaib Athar, a man with the Twitter handle @ReallyVirtual, who broke the story of the raid on bin Laden's stronghold without knowing it. "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event.)," he wrote.
"The Internet surged with conversation about the death of Osama bin Laden, cementing social-media sites' growing roles as disseminators of breaking news and as public squares where people discuss it," the Wall Street Journal reported.
Meanwhile, @keithurbahn, a former chief of staff to erstwhile Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, broke the news of what those helicopters were doing there to begin with -- they were part of a successful Navy SEAL operation to capture or kill Bin Laden.
While a tweet may have broken the news, it seems safe to say that the mere fact of Twitter as news-breaker just isn't news anymore. Consider that in 1991 it was groundbreaking that Rodney King's beating at the hands of the Los Angeles police was caught on videotape. Today, nearly every police cruiser in America has a video camera mounted on the dashboard, and events large and small are captured on camera-phones that can be turned on in an instant.
While social media will continue to evolve and deliver news in new ways, its status as part of the reporting process, it's safe to say, has moved past the age of novelty, into an era of necessity.
More galleries
