I experienced the news reporting power of Twitter today. Looking up from my desk I saw a big dark cloud of black smoke over the skyline. 
What was going on? We checked the news sites: the star.com and cp24.com, but there was nothing.
Then I searched on Twitter for "Toronto Fire" and there were tons of results - questions, comments and lots of pictures - from every angle. Following the picture links I also found this web service crowdreel. It's a website that displays pictures linked to twitter. It's fully searchable so you can see all the picture associated with a search term like "toronto fire":
The news websites took another half an hour to report even sketchy details. Twitter provided thousands of points of view and nearly as many photos. This was a great example of crowd-sourcing the news.
It turned out to be a fire on the rooftop of a condo - it was put out in less than an hour - no injuries!
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