The enormity of the situation called for an entirely new vocabulary

The FBI was clearly investigarting the situation ...

One is to try to get clicks by blasting out headlines. I do that. Seems to work - most days, Twitter is my number-1 referrer outside of Google searches. It's not really that much different than, say, an e-mail newsletter. And that's basically what @BostonGlobe is - a headline-spewing robot (as opposed to the Twitter accounts of individual reporters).

Another way is as a news gathering tool. It's vital for somebody like me, because it lets me cover a large city in a way one person just wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

But, really, there's also using it as a conversation, which feeds into and off of the other two ways. At least for breaking local news (T fires, crime, beer trucks hurtling off the Deck, etc.), news has really become a conversation, not a one-to-many thing. Everybody's walking around with a camera these days, and so many people want to report what they see around them. So I take that stuff and retweet it (and post it here, natch), which leads other people to post what they know. And when I don't know what's going on, chances are there's somebody out there who does, so if I repost somebody's question about why X just happened, because I don't know the answer, often somebody will reply why it just happened.

When it works, it's an amazing thing to watch and be part of. Doesn't lessen the need for reporters and editors (somebody needs to collect all this stuff and then try to make sense of it), but it dramatically expands the concept of reporting and gives people a way to contribute, in pretty much real time, to informing other folks, which is great because we all basically Want to Know.