It may not be worth a reporter’s time to spend too much time trolling the local Twittersphere; with so much noise, it could be a real time-waster. Then again if there’s a clerk or intern with not enough to do, maybe worthwhile?

Where this can really come in handy for a reporter or editor is monitoring local tweets during the early stages of a breaking news event. Y’know, a big multi-car accident just happened and folks are sitting in the resulting traffic jam. Some may tweet from their phones, and a reporter monitoring local tweets might gain some insight. Hell, in that example you could ask a witness a question via Twitter (using @name or direct message) while he’s still in his car at the scene.

It’s still a bit early on this, but Twitter is growing quickly and I think it will become more and more useful in these ways in time. With the growth of smartphones, this army of eyewitnesses with the tools to share their experiences immediately is an insanely useful thing for local reporters. It’s now easy to be driving by our hypothetical accident, snap a photo with your iPhone, and tweet it.

Here’s a post from Amy Gahran a few months ago on this topic:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=143981

I simply see a lot of potential here for harnessing the “power of the crowd.” The combination of Twitter and smartphones like the iPhone that I see as profound.

Don’t get me wrong — there’s a lot to Twitter, especially in the social media/community building sphere. But I haven’t yet gotten any breaking news from Twitter in the past several months I’ve used it. What am I missing?