Let me concur with and expand a bit on Steve’s post below, and also throw some respectful skepticism the way of Jeff Jarvis. Here’s what he says about the coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings via blogs, cell phones, and other 21st-century means:

This yields a new architecture of news, a distributed architecture. It’s what is bound to happen. Those students put their news up on their own sites because they have them and because the people they care about know their addresses and will read them. … I have no doubt that people will soon have their own live YouTubes/blog pages where they broadcast what they are doing at the moment: Twitter Video. We will all be Justin.TV. And sometimes, what we broadcast or blog will be news, big news, live news.

So what is the relationship of big, old, centralized media to this new, small, decentralized architecture of news? They need to link to reporting at its source. They will not have the time to get exclusive interviews and feeds. It’s live.

But this phenomenon is less revolutionary than it seems. Such distributed networks can be useful on the most basic level of news gathering: conveying information and impressions from the scene of an unfolding event. But they usually can’t fill the most important blank in the journalism equation: telling us what is really happening, what the story is. Who’s doing what where, and why?

Unfiltered immediacy is great. But unless it’s that rare situation where the guy with the video device is actually in the room where the event is happening (and, ideally, provides some kind of narration), unfiltered immediacy has serious limitations. It is raw material, and raw material from such an event is not only potentially incorrect, as Jeff notes, but by nature fragmentary, often incomprehensible. An unfolding news event - or, more generally, reality itself - is very complex. It resists instantaneous interpretation. Any media machine, new, old, distributed or centralized, will run into the same epistemological barriers.

Steve makes this obvious point, somehow overlooked elsewhere, in his post: you can’t tell what the heck is going on in the Albarghouti video. What is the value of something “live” if you don’t know what you’re looking at? Cable execs will disagree, but “live and on-scene” is not an end in itself.

On Monday, everybody – students, journalists, the public – were in the same boat as events played out – we all had to wait for police to investigate, for closed-mouthed university officials to open up, for some clear storyline to emerge. I stopped looking at news websites Monday afternoon because they simply were not adding much new information – the most salient detail was the rising death toll – and sometimes the information was wrong.

It’s predictable, but here it comes: facts, ideas and impressions must still be assembled into an understandable narrative, and radio, TV and newspaper newsrooms still have the resources to do that faster and better than anyone, or any group, out in the field. And that takes time – sometimes minutes, but more likely hours, and maybe not until tomorrow. Or next week.

An emergent ecosystem of on-site bloggers, videographers, amateur and professional news gatherers will spontaneously appear around any big event now, and the best stuff will quickly rise to the top, guided by CNN or Drudge. That’s a big change from what cable networks have been doing, mostly by themselves, for 20 years. But like he web itself, even the “best stuff” is going to be random and variable in quality, and that makes it more of a challenge to find the good stuff, the true stuff — and the core of the story itself.