WIRED:IT WAS around midnight, California time, when the first reports came through of a major earthquake in China. I didn't hear it from the BBC, or CNN, though.

Beating all of the news media were messages directly from friends in China, reporting events and fact-gathering with each other on "Twitter", the micro-blogging site. Users in Beijing felt the tremors; others closer to the epicentre soon joined the conversation. Within 20 minutes of the earthquake striking Sichuan province, the net knew more than the press was reporting.

For a few hours, a rhythm emerged: news was reported first by Twitter-users relaying their reports from friends; then the news was translated to the English-speaking Twitter community; and then, finally, it appeared in news reports on major websites.

Deep in the Chinese net, the turnaround was even faster - Chinese news sites plundering live reports and photographs from net users as quickly as they appeared.

Was this yet another triumph of online journalism over the traditional kind? Up to a point, Lord Copper: new media are certainly better placed to handle the news of a major earthquake than traditional media - but it's not clear how much of that is down to the unique benefits of new media rather than the unique qualities of an earthquake.

The fact of it is instantly known among a large number of people: anyone who feels the tremor, no matter how far away, can (and does) pass the news on. It's hard to write a credible media report, however, without more information from reliable sources, and that data can come far more slowly.

At midnight, net users knew only the barest facts, gleaned from the United States Geological Survey's automated earthquake information website, and little more. The true level of devastation only became clear over time.

Within half an hour of hearing the first reports on Twitter, my partner and I created the first page on the user-generated news site Wikinews. That report beat most of the major news outlets for covering what little was known. Its content, however, stayed largely constant for three hours.

Wikinews, like newspapers and more reputable TV shows, waits for verifiable sources. But, outside of that theoretical definition of "news", the personal tragedies and emotional impact of the Sichuan province earthquake move far faster online. Indeed, the 24-hour channels, the online news sites, and later press reports frequently depended on the net to expand the story: shaky phonecam videos of even shakier office staff; desperate messages of family members seeking contact with lost victims; digital photographs of the devastation uploaded to the public on photo-sharing websites. None of these necessarily added to the raw statistics of the drama, but all of them contributed to understanding the wider effect of the quake.

Newspapers and news television can only plunder these snapshots, and that is a perfectly valid function. We want the event summarised, condensed and packaged. But the groundswell of new data and personal anecdote online continues unabated.

Two days after our few sentences were added on Wikinews, the entry on the "large earthquake in China" had expanded to cover most of the salient facts; other user-generated content, like the Wikipedia entry on "the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake", covered as much detail as any general news piece, but the tide of photographs, personal stories and calls for help online continued far beyond both.

More importantly, in China itself these personal messages overwhelmed and coralled any official message from the Chinese authorities. While rumours went around that the Red Cross website was being blocked by the Great Firewall of China, it was impossible for the State Council to block all of the reports coming from the central region. Even conspiracy theories of flocks of toads and prophetic earthquake clouds being ignored by government officials were allowed to run through internet forums (though dismissed as "unreasonable" by an official spokesperson).

This seems to be the real significance of the net in a time of disaster. News arrives quickest when spread by word of mouth, and the internet has not changed this. But it has changed the relationship of personal experience with the mass media. Now we can all compare the two: and if the press says one thing, and the word from the devastated cities say another, we can tell. Neither has an exclusive hold on the truth. Eye-witnesses jump to conclusions as easily as distant pundits. But where the two conflict, we can end our ignorance, and where they agree, we can more easily estimate that this is the truth.

With the Chinese earthquake, the two match so well that it is hard to tell how one side improves the other. But it is not the big, loud news stories where the net makes the difference so much as the quieter, more easily repressed stories.

Perhaps we will see the net make a difference not in these early days of rescue, but in the much longer, more complex story of the rebuilding of Sichuan province.