The horse's mouth.
It stands to reason that if we really want to be on top of the news, rather than
tapping straight into a news service, we should be tapping into the sources of
that news service. That would require, I suppose, listening in to police band
radio, or setting up your own personal wire-service that picks up reports from
obscure sources. Though this might work, I doubt that anyone with a full-time
job could logically devote his or her life to this. Being a true news junkie would
seem to be a full-time job unto itself.
Sometimes we're lucky. A
CNET News report from last month tells the story of a Los Angeles woman who
Twittered that she had just experienced an earthquake. Many more than her regular
circle of recipients picked up on her report. I suppose that it's messages of
this sort that lead to reports on Wikinews,
since being a "news source you can write" requires catching a story
from a source other than a wire service. But of course her short message wasn't
what let the world know that a rather small earthquake had just taken place. News
services were able to get that information from numerous other reliable sources.
Go to: More, more, give me more!, or
Go to: Actually, I could have waited.