Online Media Cultist

It’s pretty difficult to not at least make mention of the terrible and deeply troubling incident at Virginia Tech today, which as of this writing has left at least 33 dead and a stunned nation wishing it could go back to squabbling about Don Imus and other relatively small issues (like online media cult-ery).

Search Marketing Gurus points out that Newsvine was the first social news site to pick up on the story. Its affiliation with Associated Press allowed it to get the news out so quickly, I suppose. There’s some more chatter about how Newsvine was able to “scoop” Digg on this story, which feels somewhat strange – to me, at the least – to focus on in light of such a brutal and gut punching news event.

Bloggers Blog does a great job of covering the day in terms of how the blogosphere first brought some of the story to light (can you even imagine sitting in your dorm room and writing a piece called Madness on Campus while all hell was breaking loose?).

Wired’s Threat Level attempts to calm emotions surrounding attempts to identify the now slain shooter as the “Live Journal blog of a particular 23-year-old gun nut in Virginia.”

“Mobile phone journalism” as a rising asset in the citizen journalist’s toolkit is another angle being picked up, by the likes of Center for Citizen Media Blog and others. Poynter Online declares that today is “destined to become one of those cornerstone events in citizen journalism and participatory media.”

Boing Boing presents a particularly chilling photo of a French class held hostage to fear, and links to a lot more coverage on Wired, including cell phone video footage.

In late breaking news, CNN reports that “…police have a preliminary identification of the man who methodically shot and killed at least 30 people on the campus of Virginia Tech, but they are not yet ready to release it.”

Update: Mathew Ingram points out that social networks are now an important part of national stories: ” One Facebook group set up in memory of those killed had more than 17,000 members within hours of the shooting and now has over 96,000 members and 9,000 “wall” posts or messages.”

It’s now being reported that the shooter was a 23-year old Virginia Tech senior from South Korea. The possibility of a second shooter is still being investigated.