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On the January 14th broadcast of Stars of PR on www.voiceamerica.com, news producer Anna Gonzalez of News 8 talked about how she single handedly broke the Fort Hood horror story. Ms. Gonzalez was able to get to the scene immediately because of the geographic proximity and cover the breaking story out of the palm of her hand. She tweeted about the gunshots, the casualties, the deaths before traditional news crews were able to set up their live shots much less begin their coverage. She was also able to unobtrusively move through the “restricted areas” and get interviews with concerned family members, witnesses and by-standers. Finally, @webanna was able to send minute-by-minute updates to the News 8 newsroom where the videos, photos, and interviews were professionally packaged and disseminated to news organizations and views around the globe.

Public Relations practitioners and journalists are now reinventing the news landscape. The race to get the story first has a new meaning. Any citizen journalist can break a major story that will be heard around the world if they have enough followers on Twitter. News isn’t only about breaking the story, but encouraging interaction between millions of people without geographic boundaries.

We have seen this happen with the protests in Iran, and today we are monitoring the earthquake disaster in Haiti in near real-time as the casualties continue to increase. As Anna pointed out on this morning’s broadcast, Twitter has made it easy for the masses to donate relief funds to the right charities connected with Haiti immediately.

It is time for the world to wake up and realize that there is a lot more to Twitter than posting an irrelevant status update!