Coverage of yesterday’s horrific massacre at Virginia Tech was hardly a showpiece for semi-pro and citizen journalist.

Contrary to the reports of boosters, like Amy Gahran at Poynter Online who called it “Another Sad but Seminal Day for CitJ,” those who would denigrate the whole idea of citizen journalism got plenty of ammo from bloggers who raced to mistakenly identify the shooter.

Another blog, by a self-identified assistant physics professor in Massachusetts got closer with outlines of the story vaguely correct, but again with the wrong person named.

The semi-pros did a better job particularly given how prepared Blacksburg is. (Tom Watson and I first covered Blacksburg’s groundbreaking municipal Internet initiative, the Blacksburg Electronic Village, for The New York Times in 1996.) The Virginia Tech student newspaper, Collegiate Times,  posted minute by minute updates throughout the day, even though the paper’s own servers were down. But for a news operation on the scene, staffed by peers of the victims AND the shooter, the CT coverage was remarkably thin–few photos, little comment from students, and NO investigation. Hard to believe that at the very least the paper’s editors didn’t start tugging at the thread of the earlier murders, looking for witnesses and others, given that they were sitting on top of the biggest news story ever to hit Blacksburg.

Planet Blacksburg–a pioneering, student run Web-based newspaper–was slower and more considered in its updates, but failed to advance the story beyond what was being reported by the much maligned “MSM” and didn’t deliver any deeper, inside sense of the events or mood on campus.

The most successful social coverage of the event was Wikipedia’s which was updated and edited in real time much in the way traditional news coverage is called in by stringers, edited and published. But this was entirely collaborative. If this is the future of citizen journalism, then the future is bright indeed!

Blog attempts to record and respond to events–first and second person  accounts were interesting but not more informative than what was available on CNN or MSNBC, in part because those broadcast outlets were busy soliciting Internet contributions from amateurs with almost distasteful aggressiveness. CNN was calling for submissions the way traffic reporters ask for drivers to call in from cell phones. But they had plenty of accidental material on air, including cellphone video whose audio track captured the massacre.

It seems to me that citizen journalism, at least of breaking news events, works by sheer dumb luck–someone is in the right place at the right time with a camera like Virginia Tech engineering grad student Jamal Albarghouti whose cell phone video which capture the sound of gunshots became the cornerstone of CNN’s coverage. MSM is well on the way to fully co-opting citizen coverage of breaking events.

Facebook was flooded by members creating greif groups–the cyber equivalent of leaving flowers at the scene of a tragedy–and the social network served to connect friends across campuses where once telephone calls did the trick.

I don’t want to lose perspective. The important thing to remember is that 33 people lost their lives to the senseless mayhem of a psychotic killer. But despite all the blather, citizen journalism didn’t get much of a boost yesterday.

UPDATE: Citizen journalism, and blogging in particular, is proving to be better at investigative journalism than it is at breaking news. Students in the shooter’s playwriting class offered memories of creepy, violent plays to the Collegiate Times, and a former classmate Ian Macfarlane, now an AOL employee, acutally posted two of the plays, as well as this chilling memory:

When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments.