At about 11:41am PST today (an hour ago), a 5.4 earthquake hit east of Los Angeles. Don’t be fooled by the link, I didn’t hear about it from CNN. The ‘news’ mediums that broke the story first were Twitter and Ustream.tv. I initially heard about it on Alejandro Reyes’ live Ustream channel as viewers in the area commented as it was happening.

I went over to Summize…err, Twitter Search, to hear more news and see how everyone was doing out there. Within a half hour of when the news first broke, there were already over 4,000 tweets about the event (and Twitter didn’t go down!). Luckily, no one had reported any injuries or structural damage; just a few things knocked over.

What I’m getting to here is that I didn’t go to CNN.com or turned the TV on, this event happened ‘before my eyes’ on the Web through these real-time mediums. I was able to get a breaking story that all the major news channels are now covering, before those very major news channels. For a user who utilizes these tools on a daily basis, I’ve turned less and less to actual news mediums for breaking news or stories and in a sense, let the stories come to me through Twitter and other networks.

Does this spell doom for traditional news avenues? Obviously not. It just shows the opportunity for both social networks and news sites. Social networks are reaping the benefits as their users are communicating with their network throughout the day, thus creating a chain reaction of messages when national and even global events occur. They haven’t necessarily shunned the news media but CNN, FOX, etc. are not the breaking news centers that they once used to be, as they’re becoming more of a secondary source. But how can the news media take this and flip it into a positive? Well, they’ll have to get (and have been) more active with Twitter and other networks to monitor such internet ‘phenomenon’. Its more so a form of industry monitoring/management where news sites can essentially be on top of reporting new stories or in this case, natural disasters, through the use of these networks.

I admit, this opportunity is at small proportions right now, but do you think we will see the rise of social journalism in the near future? What do you think about the evolution of social media forming into a breaking news center? Do you see traditional news eventually giving social networks more weight and credibility as a source for their stories?

Let me know your thoughts!

Update: A continued Plurk discussion on this topic.