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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Haiti: the power of Twitter

Watching the terrible events in Haiti unfold as a breaking news story on Tuesday night was another powerful indicator of the power of Twitter as a tool for news and picture coverage.
Getting live coverage from the scene was a real problem for the broadcasters as power lines and phone links were cut.
The very first pictures started to appear on Twitter though around 11pm and I immediately started looking for anything from Haiti on http://www.picfog.com/ which is a great aggregator of real time images.
It took about 30 minutes then for these same pictures to be picked up and broadcast by the rolling news programmes. The first photographer to post was @CarelPedre
Sky News was the first UK broadcaster I saw to make a direct appeal to Tweeters to send them any updates directly.

TJ

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