USF Bulls Radio

It started with sirens and a voice booming over the loudspeakers: “Armed intruder on campus. Stay Inside. Lock Doors.”

In a matter of minutes the Tampa campus of the University of South Florida descended into madness. Campus police and SWAT team members armed with assault rifles charged into the library demanding that every student leave with their arms raised.

Students rushed across campus for shelter, used chairs and desks to barricade themselves inside classrooms, or stood in awe as parts of the campus turned into an apparent war zone right before their eyes.

This scene was described in detail, not by major news agencies, but by a more powerful source of information. In fact, these reports came in a good hour before the major news agencies in the Tampa Bay Area even broke the story.

The eyewitness accounts that provided this preliminary insight into a campus on lockdown came from an increasingly prominent source: the Twitter-verse. As students watched Monday's events unfold they pulled out their iPhones and Blackberrys and began to tweet about what they saw.

This curious phenomenon is nothing new. We saw the same behavior this year on a much larger scale after the Iranian government bought their reelection and squashed the following dissent. Major media outlets were not allowed in the country, but reports soon began to surface on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

And so, Twitter had broken onto the scene as a viable tool for news-collectors around the world, offering eyewitness accounts to breaking news hours before the first news crews could arrive at the scene.

But a whole new can of worms was opened with regard to how journalists would conduct their business in this expanding Digital Age. While monitoring tweets allows for instant transfer of communication, the reliability of such information could very easily be called into question. What a handful of onlookers claims to have seen may be very different from what happened in reality.

Verifying tweets is a difficult task, especially when dealing with information that is extremely time sensitive and constantly changing. Still, journalists must figure out how to use this new tool in a professional manner. The power of using Twitter in eyewitness reports is already clearly evident. Now, news outlets will have to decide just how to harness this power, without sacrificing journalistic integrity.

Regardless of its implications, USF experienced the same phenomenon on Monday. Bulls Radio relied on initial Twitter reports to communicate what was happening to all of the students who may have been trapped on campus armed with nothing more than their laptops or cellphones.

Before ABC, Fox, or Bay News 9 arrived at the scene, there were only the conversations playing out in real time in the Twitter-verse. And these reports helped to inform and calm the fears of the thousands of uncertain and disconnected USF students who were hungry for answers during Monday's events.