I’m not sure I’d use the term “watershed” however; it certainly is being a fascinating experience of convergence: old media, new media, citizen journalism, neighborhood journalists & even commenters on the various sources who live in the area of the action. A very real-time experience when the electronic journalists were getting no air-time. Much more important for them to run the infomercials and the sports news. Useless they were.

Washington police shootings: A watershed moment for Twitter?

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Bruggeman, CEO of technology company ActiveWords, was one of hundreds of “citizen journalists” who added context and insight to the events as they unfolded, creating a powerful source of information that we’ve not quite seen before around a news event of this size in Washington state.

In an email this morning, Bruggeman explained that he didn’t see himself doing anything “earthshaking or watershed, just paying attention, and trying to add to the conversation/story.” He first noticed the police descend on his neighborhood around 9:50 last night. After checking the news and Twitter for information about what was happening around him, he realized there was none, so he figured he should start posting updates himself.

He ended up picking up about 50 new followers on Twitter, some local, others international. The “real news guys” didn’t start showing up in the neighborhood with their cameras until about an hour after the incident started.

“As I look at what I have written, what I guess is striking is how timely my tweets were, but yet no curation, editing or real focal point that people could have gone to. The people who followed me either on Twitter or Facebook got a real time sense of what I was seeing,” he says. At the same time, it was a learning experience for him: “On reflection I am sorry that I didn’t both take some pictures and post them, and also walk down and talk to the cops on the fringe to do a better job of reporting something beyond what I was seeing from my windows and deck.”