Twittering the USAirways Plane Crash
Notch another win for citizen journalism.
Janis Krums, a guy with a camera and a penchant for social media tools, posted one of the first and most remarkable photos today of US Airways Flight 1549 after it crash-landed in the Hudson River.
“There’s a plane in the Hudson,” the Sarasota native wrote on the microblogging site Twitter just as reports began to break of the plane hitting the water off Manhattan’s west side. “I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”
The photo, which Mr. Krums posted online using a Twitter photo-sharing site, has been viewed more than 43,000 times.
Social media tools like Twitter – which allows users to tap out 140-character status updates - have changed how breaking news events are recorded and covered. They made for on-the-ground reports from the Mumbai terror attacks in November, for example.
