Politics Devours Journalism In Dana Point, Courtesy Of Twitter

My own stupid phone picture of the meeting. Compare to Bishop's.

Here's a story. Your reporter attends Dana Point City Council workshop tonight about the proposed Town Center design. Your reporter leaves midway through, unsure of what to later write about the generally uneventful first half of the meeting. Your reporter returns home a few hours later, for some reason fires up Twitter, and sees a post from Dana Point City Councilmember Joel Bishop, age 51:

joelbishop:Town center plunlic meeting in Dana Point. Very well attended. http://twitpic.com/2nwjl

Yes. Text-message typos aside (he meant "public meeting," I think), the council member beat your reporter -- any reporter -- to the story of the meeting. I mean, it's not a story, but it is coverage. His TwitPic is a photo of the audience, taken from behind the makeshift dais set up at the Del Obispo rec center -- and, apparently, posted to Twitter from behind that dais.

And now I'm blogging about it.

Two ways to look at all this. Option one: Whoa, the source-journalist-reader continuum is being mucked up by technology even more to than it already has been since the dawn of the Internet. Option two: What the hell is Joel Bishop doing Twittering during his own city council meeting?