ABSTRACT
As a news event, the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 showed that a great deal of what is called “breaking news” is in the process of moving to social media platforms. It was ordinary citizen eye-witnesses who produced news by using their Facebook or Twitter accounts to immediately report on the latest developments in the chase of the suspects, while mainstream media were dependent, at least for a part of their news reporting, on what citizen journalists made available via social media. The resulting news production chain, characterized by little or no journalistic and editorial curation of the information, had consequences for the quality of the news that reached news audiences, in terms of how accurate or misleading that information was.
