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Something going on at BU's Warren Towers
By adamg on Sat, 04/25/2009 - 7:53pm
Looks like a steam leak in an elevator control room left a number of students trapped in elevators (see comments below).
TONS of firetrucks and police.
Warren towers has multiple elevators stuck with multiple occupants.
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Comments
I've figured it out
Twitter is a fiendishly clever plot by the news companies to derail citizen journalism.
In 140 characters ...
or less
Fire Dept radio
http://www.scanboston.com/BFD.asx
Big steam leak in elevator machine room.
ETA:
It's fascinating: they haven't found all the elevators yet. No panic, just they're not sure which floors they're on!
Can we please not link to
Can we please not link to twitter as a news source?
Why Not?
These twitter messages contained more information than what the newspaper told hours later. And they provided the info to those of us who suddenly saw a bunch of firetrucks in front of a building for hours. This is the type of event that twitter is perfect for getting the gist when it matters.
I suppose he could have linked to...
A newspaper... oh... if any of them covered it.
Yes, the initial Twitter posts were confusing and contradictory
But, then, so is initial news reporting sometimes (yesterday, I had to pull down a home-page post about swine flu being reported in Massachusetts because MSNBC got it wrong).
I perhaps do need to be more careful about what I quote from Twitter, but, as shown in this case, we ultimately got to the basic news: A malfunction in an elevator control room shut down the dorms and left students trapped in elevators. And hopefully helped answer some of the questions lots of people were asking (well, one question: What's going on at Warren Towers?).
Here's the Globe story for comparison.
whatwherewhenwhohowmany
Where: Warren Towers
When: Twitter timestamp
What: Something crazy
Who: firetrucks and police
How many: TONS!
I think there's room for improvement.
When I looked
I saw something to the effect of "omg wtf like tons of like firemen and stuff lol" -- 24 minutes old with no followup.
That report is mainly useful if you're a journalist who needs to know something is going on so you can get over there and get the story/photos, *except* in case of being a journalist, you would have at least that much info 5-10+ minutes before Twitter, from the police and fire radio channels, dispatching the TONS of responders there.
As an ordinary Bostonian, the Twitter didn't tell me anything I needed to know then. All it did was sprinkled bragging rights to have "gotten the inside scoop from Twitter before old media can" and a sense of being "connected" in a worthlessly superficial way.
See you think you got it
See you think you got it right, but you didn't. Take it from someone who was inside the whole time. It only takes one of you twittering fools to say something wrong before everyone has wrong information. The reason news sources take longer reporting information is because they do what everyone should do but what you won't: they check their sources and confirm the information. You are just spreading fuel to a fire of disinformation.
Granted
But what was wrong?
I agree with Adam here
TONS of firetrucks and police. - There were.
Warren towers has multiple elevators stuck with multiple occupants. - There were.
Building without power, lots of alarms. - There was.
Comm. Ave. inbound totally shut down. - It was.
Some students trapped for several hours
Daily Free Press reports.