A lot of outlets are calling this Twitter's CNN moment. It'll be interesting to see if Twitter has the legs to maintain this crowd sourced news momentum that it has been building.
To contrast all this, we have Zuck at facebook providing smooth stable leadership that can clearly be seen in how fb as a product has scaled and evolved. Twitter meanwhile may be scaling and sue that can require significant effort - but as a product in year five, it's a relative fail for the hype and valuation.
Twitter seems to be a bit different in that regard.
IMO user engagement is one of twitter's biggest issues.
As it stands right now, twitter is a great tool for journalist research and other niche research. That's been true for a few years now. The problem is twitter has done little to break beyond it OR to completely own that space. It's similar to if facebook never really broke out of its college roots or had high account abandonment rates for non-college crowd. Both of those were proven wrong for fb; fb long ago made critical product decisions to break beyond college(such as complete removing course listings) and working country by country to ensure penetration and engagement.
Twitter is more akin to a real time, universal log + interactions, but it doesn't come with a central studio that sifts through the materials and gives you the good stuff. If you don't know where to look, for most it will always be a hindsight experience.
For me personally, that was far more satisfying than hearing about it via "traditional" sources. (Including Reddit.)
The benefit to CNN is that almost every household had/has access to CNN. It's some channel on basic cable, even if you didn't regularly watch it, it was easy to find and was pushing the same news out to everyone.
Twitter on the other hand is not as simple to just start using. You need to sign up, and then find the right people to follow (granted, Twitter does try to make this easier), but for any given event it's hard to find in real time a tweetstream that is going to be better than just watching CNN or other major news outlet. On top of that, Twitter is filled with parody accounts, people making stuff up, and lots of other noise.
Yes, conceptually a lot of people have access to Twitter. However, from a practicality standpoint my personal opinion is that it's not very effective tool for a scenario like this.