Four minutes after US Airways flight 1549 landed in the Hudson river, New York resident Jim Hanrahan used a web social service called Twitter to say to his friends "I just watched a plane crash into the hudson rive[r] in manhattan" using TwitterBerry on his BlackBerry. His tweet came almost fifteen minutes before the mainstream media started reporting the crash to the public, and for all intents and purposes "broke the news" of the plane's emergency landing.

A few minutes later, another Twitter user Janis Krums was on one of the ferries diverted to the crash site and uploaded pictures of the scene as they approached it to TwitPic from his iPhone. His pictures were quickly circulated around Twitter and the web, allowing people everywhere to get an up-close firsthand account of the events in the Hudson as they transpired. Along with news from Twitter, onlookers were uploading pictures of the event to Flickr, and videos recorded on their pocket camcorders and cell phones to YouTube. A Wikipedia site for the event was almost immediately created and updated, and blogs everywhere were abuzz with news of the event.

Social media are changing how we get our news. Whereas a few years ago most people wouldn't have heard of the emergency landing until they saw the news or read a paper, today the social media are able to break stories faster than any national news media outlet possibly could—simply because it theoretically has reporters everywhere. The media are definitely taking notice, with almost every major news network currently operating a Twitter feed, and many even creating its own Facebook applications in order to keep people coming.

Do you get any of your news from Twitter or other social networking sites? How do you think they're revolutionizing how we get news?

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