For the second time in a week New Zealand is sitting under a Tsunami watch.

What is interesting is the rising power of Twitter and Citizen Journalists in reporting the news much faster than the mainstream media (MSM), in fact today I was the one who tipped off NZ Herald regarding the Tsunami alert.

This was the first tweet that I received regarding the Tsunami it is from someone who works in the pacific tsunami warning centre:

Clicking on the link, and checking with the USGS Earthquake website I realised that the earthquake was huge and had just happened. So out I tweet to my 100 or so followers on twitter and cross posted the news to facebook, before then posting a direct message to NZ Herald. Here is the stream of responses (remember the higher the list the newer the post, my post is at the bottom):

From this the NZ Herald website was updated:

Then out comes the Civil Defense warning:

Then the rest of the news site begin to follow up:

In the past you had to stay tuned to your radios, tvs etc waiting for the news sites to tell you what was happening, now it appears the tables have turned and joe public seems to be informing the news media of breaking news much faster than they can report it.

Tags: News, Tsunami, Twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 11:31 am and is filed under Comment and Opinion, Computers, Cool Stuff, News & Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.