NEW YORK: Cassy Hayes and Jasmine Coleman were among the first fans to arrive outside the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles where Michael Jackson was brought and later pronounced dead.

How did they hear the news so quickly? Twitter.

The two young women had learned about Jackson's death like so many who get their news nowadays: by reading the ever-flowing feed of real-time information on the microblogging service.

Twitter's constantly updating record of up-to-the-minute reaction has in some instances threatened to usurp media coverage of breaking news. It has also helped many celebrities, athletes and politicians bypass the media to get their message directly to their audience. Make no mistake about it; Twitter has in many ways been a boon to the media. It's one more way a story might go viral and it's arguably the best way for a news outlet to get closer to their readership. Most outlets now have a presence on Twitter with a feed directing readers to their respective sites.

But even in an Internet world that has for years eroded the distance between media and consumer, Twitter is a jolt of democratization to journalism. To date, the most salient, powerful example of Twitter's influence has been Iranian protesters using the service (among many other methods) to assemble marches against what they feel has been an unjust election.

Further, many Americans were upset at what they considered CNN's thin early coverage of the revolution in Iran and voiced their complaints on Twitter. Some said they preferred news on Twitter to the cable news network. Many users have become accustomed to clicking on Twitter when news breaks. There, they can find a sea of reaction, commentary and links to actual articles.

‘Twitter absolutely changes the media landscape,’ said Ross Dawson, author and communications strategy analyst. ‘I like to refer to Marshall McLuhan's description of media as 'an extension of our senses.' Now, Twitter is extending our senses to tens of millions of people who are often right on the scene where things are happening.’

Ashton Kutcher, one of Twitter's most popular users, in a Web video evoked the rhetoric of a revolutionary: 'We can and will create our media.'

Kutcher sees Twitter as putting media power in the hands of regular people and, presumably, regular movie stars. But comedian Michael Ian Black notes that while Twitter allows someone to 'communicate very directly with people,' it also allows you to keep them 'totally at arm's length.'

There are no follow-up questions on Twitter if the user chooses not to hear them. When tweets replace an interview or a press conference, something is lost. Twitter, where brevity can neatly do away with messy details, can thus be used to control one's message and one's image.

But truthfulness remains the biggest problem: Those direct, near-instantaneous dispatches are far less reliable than old-fashioned journalism. News that circulates on Twitter, re-tweeted from person to person, can spread quickly - often too quickly for it to be verified. False rumors spread daily on Twitter. Dawson notes that established media channels still have a virtual monopoly on credibility.

In the days following Jackson's death, fake reports have frequently had to be knocked down by news organizations that do the fact checking. Erroneous declarations of celebrity deaths have been one trend.

While involvement in the protests in Iran might be Twitter's most meaningful achievement thus far, some have noted that many inaccuracies were circulated. That has raised the concern that some people or governments may use Twitter to spread disinformation even more dangerous than suggesting some celebrity is dead.

Andrew Keen, author of ‘The Cult of the Amateur,’ believes Twitter represents the future of both the Internet and media. But Keen says the Iran coverage on Twitter ‘exposes all the weakness of the service, the fact that it's so chaotic and unreliable. Who knows who's tweeting what?’

 ‘The very nature of an editor needs to shift,’ says Keen. ‘(The Iran experience) is going to underline the need more and more for curators, for people who are able to take all of this raw content and actually shape it into valuable news.’

-AP