Thursday morning at 7 am, I was reading the Record and watching Canada AM. Doing my old media thing. CTV no longer has the morning news. The ticker tape said there was a fire in Waterloo. Well we have had a few house fires in town, so I thought nothing of it.
Then at around 8:30 am, I sat down to work at my computer but first took a look at twitter. I immediately found out that Mel’s diner, Sugar Mountain, Ceasar’s Martini, Mr. Sushi, etc. were in flames and I instantly got pictures and youtube videos from the public on the scene or in the apartments nearby. The best twitters came from Mayor Halloran.
Even though I follow the Record (a short article on the website), 570news and CTV, I am now getting my latest news from my Mayor instead of the regular news outlets. Fortunately, Brenda was accurate with some rah, rahs, for the Kitchener and Waterloo firefighters (for sure), but should I be getting my news from the Mayor generally?
I don’t mean Brenda shouldn’t twitter, I love her twitters and I retweeted her messages about the fire and tweeted some of my own.
But if the old media is crying about losing readers, I have to ask why the Record didn’t gather the twitters — councilors and the mayor had twitter quotes, as did many of the public, their article and repost the youtube pictures and video quickly. (Is this a copyright problem?)
CNN has Ireport where people can upload their video and messages to the the site. I would love to start a local site like this, but sadly, I don’t have the time or resources (I own some great domain names though, like Waterlooregionnow). So I throw this out to the world. BTW, this would solve the local advertising problem on the net, also.
570 news was soon tweeting, but CTV, they are no longer into local news. Rather tell us about William Shatner for GG, so last year.
By the afternoon, the Record had a long article interviewing the shop owners, and that is great and I read it. Certainly follow up is good.
But long before the old media could get their act together, twitter was trending #Mel, #waterloofire, etc. to the whole world.
And speaking of that, facebook and twitter had many more real local persons talking about their flight delays in Europe due to the ash. Not to mention the events, etc. I am learning about through the Social Media.
It’s a new world.
Further, just found this link in a tweet. All the pics you need of the fire and aftermath. http://ow.ly/1CsV0
Jane Mitchell's Blog 
Jane,
Great comments! Some people have asked me recently why I’m on Twitter, more specifically, what I use it for. This is it! It was interesting to read about the Mayor’s tweets in this morning’s Record. Publications like People include recent tweets – no reason The Record couldn’t. Would love to see a local site up and running – links to YouTube, Twitter, old media. No reason it couldn’t work.
I rarely get my first hand news from reputable news agencies. I get my news by following people who work for those news sources on Twitter – they’ve tweeted about it long before the story has been written. With respect to the Waterloo Fire, pictures and a story did not show up on The Record website until after 9am – I’d known about it since I got up, and seen pictures, by following locals on Twitter.
As far as I am concerned, the immediacy of news depends on access to social media/networking sites. The full news is still worth reading, for interviews and the full story, but it’s no longer the place that news breaks.