Anyway, I don’t mean to suggest there’s any grand lesson here about reporting on the Internet. Yes, the news broke on Twitter, but the first solid reporting emerged from a newspaper — just four minutes after Trachtman’s tweet. And yet, you can’t dismiss the significance of that Jersey City message board, where calling 911 was itself a form of reporting. Plus, Slepian, the Advocate reporter, told me that they first learned one of the planes was Air Force One from readers who called into the newsroom.

I like the term “news ecosystem,” and it’s certainly an apt way to describe the various threads of reporting that occurred today. Trachtman was a citizen journalist, sure, but so was LaForge when he asked, “See anything?” And so was Trachtman’s friend when she scanned her favorite news sources and broadcast, over the phone, that there was no reason to worry.

I think the grand lesson from this story is that Twitter is the fastest way to get hold of uncorroborated and inaccurate hysteria, and that you have to wait for longer-form information sources to post before you get anything really useful. What’s interesting here is that the non-Twitter sources started pulling together the details just minutes after Twitter did.