This morning I had the dawning realization that news media is absolutely clueless and that social networks are the new way of finding out information on events as they happen. I woke up at 5:21am to what I thought was 1) an explosion, 2) an earthquake, or 3) a weird dream.
I ran to the TV, simultaneously taking my laptop with me, turned both on, tuned into the first morning news show, and got onto Twitter.
It took about 2 minutes to see other people posting about an earthquake in my area. Five to 7 minutes later, after reporting on a cat stuck in a tree and seeing 15 commercials, KIRO fumbled around some papers and reported a sentence or two about how there might have been a quake.
In 10 minutes, Twitter provided links to the USGS with detailed ACCURATE information, tweets from automated services came in, and several tweeters reported what they felt.
At about 15 minutes, KIRO was fumbling phone lines with ridiculous callers saying the earthquake lasted between 11-15 MINUTES. In their defence, they had someone call in from the USGS after that and report stuff you could find on the USGS website.
The point: twitter is faster, more accurate (in short periods), and has less commercials than local news. And they say social media is a fad...
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