Twitter is the Ultimate in News?

Today, Twitter got the news out 45 minutes earlier than any mainstream media that Tiger Woods hit a fire hydrant. As per Twitter, he started off Critical, them Serious, then Injured and now its "admitted, treated and released in good condition" and is now resting safely at home. We wish him well.

Now TechCrunch logged this as:

This Is Why The Internet (And Twitter) Wins

I can see why the Internet wins. That's easy. But Twitter? The question is, is this really real time, real value - ie, in the endgame, when all this stuff is stuff that people will actually pay for, what is the value of realtime sensational inaccurate sleb news on Twitter? Would you pay $0.05 for the Tiger Woods Near Death newsflash 15 minutes early before it hit the Net, or 45 minutes before it hit the wires? $0.5? $5.00?

And then look at its magnificent performance with Jan Moir et al for example.....

What would you pay to get the accurate story first? Or Warnings of real disasters?

I put up the classic 2x2 above, and apart from the vacuous joy of getting whuffie by retweeting the news microseconds before anyone else, its hard to see where the value is in this sort of news once the novelty has worn off.

The issue I'm driving at is this - The value of most of this sort of news is the lowest value media you can imagine apart from what you had for lunch or where your kitteh peed last. ( High value media is stuff that drives big impact things, moderate value media is stuff that you will pay good money to see or know - low value media is what you use to fill in the 5 minutes when you're bored waiting for something more interesting to turn up )

Update - the ongoing Tiger Woods Saga makes it clear that the initial simpering-yet-sensationalist Twitterings were complete and utter rubbish. If spreading complete and utter BS at the blink of an eye is The Ultimate In News, Lordelpus.