Feed me, please

The updates couldn’t come fast enough as I nearly pressed my face against the screen, leaning into the words crawling past my eyes.

Like a lot of people across the country, I spent the night of April 18â and into the early-morning hours of the 19thâ up late and glued to the news coming out of Watertown, Mass.

The formerly quiet New England suburb seemed to have devolved into Gotham City, with shoot-outs, robberies, manhunts, violent deaths and the massive mystery of a terrorist bombing enveloping the area like an impenetrable hood of smoke after the horrific tragedy at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

The screen that commanded my attention was not the TV but my laptop. And as midnight blurred into 2 a.m., it wasn’t CNN that had me most riveted.

It was my Twitter feed.

Reporters on the ground near the chase were posting firsthand accounts in real time Twitter pics of police cars and “Put your hands up!” quotes overheard blaring from bullhorns and into the black. There was no video or audio, but there was immediacy.

I felt like I was there.

Even as they checked their smart phones on air for updates from their sources, CNN anchors John King and Wolf Blitzer seemed woefully outpacedâwhen they weren’t plain faulty on the facts.

I muted the television and began following Jess Bidgood, a reporter with the Boston bureau of The New York Times.

Her first tweet I ever read?

“Also, Officer just told me I should turn off my cell phone if I want to live.”

Gulp.

This was real and unfiltered information. And it was all happening right now.

With roughly 555 million Twitter users and nearly twice that amount of people on Facebook, the proliferation of social media is changing the way we share the content that matters to us with our friends and colleagues. It is also changing how breaking news is reported and consumed.

For traditional news sources reporting from Boston, the blue bird proved invaluable.

The first notice of “two loud booms” at the marathon was tweeted by The Boston Globe at 2:57 p.m. on April 15. Two minutes later was this: “BREAKING NEWS: Two powerful explosions detonated in quick succession right next to the Boston Marathon finish line this afternoon.”

That message was retweeted 10,576 times, and the news spread from Twitter to TV and across the world. For better and for worse.

By and large, Twitter is now creating what 10 years ago many pundits thought blogs would, but haven’tâthat is, citizen journalists. And yet, these Twitter newswriters got things wrong about the Boston bombings, too. Big things, like the names of possible suspects. This was mostly due to misinterpreting audio from online police scanners.

Now, if the next tech startup can upgrade those scanner feeds, that would be something to tweet and retweet about.

And when the alleged attacker is tried, I don’t want to hear a verdict from John King or Wolf Blitzer or Brian Williams. I want to hear it from the Jess Bidgoods who were there, and who were there on Twitter with me in the middle of the night. This story, all 140 characters of it, belongs to them.