According to French journalist Laure Nouraout on meta-media.fr, the summit panelists made reference to the Boston bombing regularly throughout the day to provide a solid basis for their discussions. As David Hayward, Director of the BBC College of Journalism's events programme wrote on his blog: "Last week was quite extraordinary for breaking news stories. I was in New York for most of it, preparing for the BBC College of Journalism and New York Times Social Media Summit #smsnyc. As many people pointed out, the event could not have come at a better time for the issues that were to emerge."

The summit took a critical glance at the way in which breaking news is treated and consumed by the masses. The general consensus seems to be that events in Boston have acted as a real game-changer for the relationship between journalism and social media. Developments during the Boston bombing scandal were reported and discussed on Twitter on an unprecedented scale and hereby revealed the extent to which traditional methods of news reporting such as TV and radio are growing largely outdated.

a “boot camp” for journalists

Reddit is a great training tool for writers because unlike on Facebook and Twitter, users cannot lean on their followers and friends to make their posts successful. Instead, each post’s quality of writing and message is individually evaluated. Each post has an equal likelihood of making it to the site’s front page at its genesis, regardless of its author. Thus large follower bases aren’t rewarded, as they would be on Twitter and Facebook. What’s instead rewarded is concise and witty writing, the length of “half-tweets” — the same skills vital for writing headlines, which in the digital era are more important than ever. And with the deluge of posts on the site (last month there were over 55 million unique Redditors), users must hone these skills for their writing to make the front page.

“I was increasingly becoming a third-party broker, if you will, between people who had captured newsworthy content at scenes of stories and my colleagues back at work, who would effectively offer them money to buy that content,” Ebeli said. “I realized that this was the way things were going and that there needed to be a centralized location for newsworthy content online.”

Thus he created Newsmodo, which will make its formal international debut at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference in London, April 15-17. Ebeli described the platform, expected to go live mid-April, as a “one-stop shop” for media organizations and journalists to pitch and find freelance assignments throughout the world. With newsrooms’ resources dwindling, more publications are relying on freelance content — and more need a platform like Newsmodo, Ebeli said.

“They have less personnel on the ground and they have more and more news to cover and audiences have higher expectations,” Ebeli said. “They need to be nimble, they need to be agile and they need to be forward-thinking. That’s why they’re looking for platforms like Newsmodo.”

Ebeli said he began his work by constructing Newsme.com.au, the “little brother of Newsmodo,” back in 2011. But he later abandoned that site, which focused on citizen journalism.

Did someone known as BitchslappedByLogic do a better job than the mainstream media of covering a Toronto shooting that left 2 dead and 24 wounded after a street party turned violent on Monday night?

Below is an excerpt from BitchslappedByLogic's post about the shooting on Reddit, a social news website founded in 2005. It is a bluntly articulated jigsaw puzzle of linked tweets (or screenshots of tweets in cases where the original posts have been removed) that pieces together the night's violent events, and their potential ramifications in the community.

Below that is an excerpt from coverage of the shooting by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) - Canada's national public television and radio broadcaster, created in 1936.

Let us compare.

______

Reddit

Random portraits of the situation gleaned from twitter.