First picture of the US Airways crash appeared on Twitter
January 16, 2009 at 11:44 am by Jim JohnsonJim Johnson is the founder of The State of Sunshine blog and joins PoHo as a regular contributor with this post:
One of the interesting changes happening to media will be how news is brought to the rest of us.
I’m sure many were watching televsion coverage of yesterday’s crash of USAir Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in New York City. But even TV was not the fastest coverage.
Sarasota entrepreneur Janis Krums was on one of the ferries on the Hudson River that responded, and he snapped a picture and sent it via TwitPic (site may be down because of people re-tweeting the pic) and posted on Twitter.
After the image made it’s way around the Internet, MSNBC interviewed Krums:
Twitter User On MSNBC from AlleyInsider on Vimeo.
This kind of first-response, first-hand, amateur information is part of the changing media landscape. To be sure, the journalists who responded provided the coverage we need – the experience of passengers and witness, the official story from the FAA and USAir, and helped put this crash into context.
But Krums’ quick snapshot and post is a sign of how the spread of new communication tools can bring major events to us in new and exciting ways.
