Earthquake: Twitter trounces traditional news sources again!

By the time that you read this you'll of course be aware of the earthquake in Baja California, Mexico. I first caught this by seeing a trending topic of 'earthquake' on Twitter. I saw this about 25 minutes ago as I'm typing this. At the moment, 6 of the top trends on Twitter relate to it:

Now, let's see how everyone else is handling this... I did some searches just prior to starting this post to keep everything in the same time line. Sky News picked it up pretty quickly, although they didn't have much knowledge to share:

CNN were also early off the mark with this one:

They've got a little more information, the time it struck, the centre and some witness descriptions. ABC News had a little information, but not much:

So - traditional news resources have a bare minimum of information. What has Twitter got for me? I've got eyewitness accounts such as"i was driving and that earthquake scared the hell out of me. i seriously started hyperventilating."  "Oooh! Another strong aftershock" some jokes "Me-"Dad, did you feel the earthquake?" Dad-"Not an earthquake son, your mother was doing the cha-cha."" (that people actually tweet while they're in the middle of an earthquake is amazing to me!) which included photographs which gave me a real indication of what had happened. There was a link to a really useful map that gave me a clear idea of the position, someone tweeted a link on what to do in an earthquake, and I had over 130,000 tweets in 3 minutes for 'earthquake' search on Twitter:

Google News caught it pretty quickly:

I have to say however that Bing failed miserably. There was nothing on the first page of news results for earthquake california - in fact, the UK version had a story up really quickly, which surprised me.

What's that I hear you say? A news website that I missed? Oh... you don't mean the BBC by any chance? Their headline, a good 40 minutes after I got the news via Twitter looks like this:

Yup, not a mention. Perhaps it's hidden away somewhere - let's do a quick search, shall we? Their search engine pops up a link immediately... but it's dated December 2003. 

There really wasn't any doubt in my mind that Twitter is THE first place for news stories, but the amount, the richness and variety of information is becoming quite astonishing. The only thing that surprises me, or perhaps disappoints me more, is the inability of the traditional news media (odd how quickly I've started to think of webpage based news as 'traditional') to keep up to date with what's going on. And you know what - they can't. Because they can't be everywhere, in the way that Twitter is.