MIR reader Ashley Bolser sent me over this story he was reading at CNN. It describes how Twitter…

“stole a march on traditional media when it was the first outlet to publish dramatic pictures of the Turkish Airlines crash”

The report continues:

Moments after the plane crashed at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport on Wednesday morning the news was appearing on Twitter, iReport’s International Correspondent Errol Barnett said.

So Twitter nailed the international mainstream media? Again?

Well no.

Not quite.

SOME users of Twitter were on the ground when it happened. One, it seems, took a picture. One assumes that they Tweeted or Twitpic’ed the picture up to the internet. CNN then found out about it. Somehow. Then CNN checked with Dutch officials and confirmed the news. Then they took the Twitter picture ‘to air’.

This is really, really smart.

But there’s also about a billion different flaws with the approach.

If I was on the scene with ZERO Twitter followers, I sent in a Twitpic called DSC0101112.jpg, you’d never know about it.

Not unless I gave some context in my message. Like ‘plane crash in Amsterdam here is a picture:’ followed by the Twitpic URL. Or not unless I ‘atted’ the CNN iReport team.

You also need to be really smart with the text used in your Tweet so that people monitoring the public Twitter search system find the stuff. I imagine the CNN social media chaps have got permanent searches going on all the time like ‘plane crash’ and ‘nuclear missile’ or similar.

But Twitter isn’t an outlet. The frontpage of Twitter has absolutely NOTHING on the Turkish Jet Crash. So Twitter didn’t beat the Reuters photographer. Twitter replaced the Reuters/AP photo journalist platform and enabled CNN to get hold of the images.

Setting aside the obvious human tragedy of today’s news, the medium and the possibilities of Twitter are getting more and more exciting.

At some point I will be there when Paris Hilton falls out of a nightclub with Prince William, both naked, both kissing passionately and both holding previously unreleased Nokia N98 16 megapixel mobile handsets. And I will have my N95 8GB there, fully charged, with my 3G+ Vodafone data network poised to take my pixels to ShoZu and from thence to the world.

Have a read of the CNN story here.

I’m experiencing a renaissance in ‘value’ for mainstream media. I can’t be bothered to read through every single public twitter message and piece together what happened. Instead I’ll leave it to a journalist (or should that be ’social network analyst?) to do the research and knock it together into a decent commentary that I can consume. I value that. Standby, I’m willing to bet The London Times will have an overview online in a few hours.