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Follow Bhutto Assassination News via Blogs, Twitter

The announcement of Bhutto's assassination as it appeared on the Teeth Twitter feed this morning.

As I was making tea this morning, I heard on NPR that Pakistani opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto had just been assassinated at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Immediately I jumped on my laptop. Of course, Google News already offers a slew of mainstream news coverage of the assassination -- based almost entirely on reporting done outside Pakistan, since tight restrictions on journalists remain in force in Pakistan even though President Pervez Musharraf lifted lifted six weeks of emergency rule on Dec. 15. (More on that country's press restrictions from the International Federation of Journalists and the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists.)

Given the current dearth of available professional journalism from within Pakistan, the country's lively blogosphere -- much of it in English -- has become a key source of original and diverse news, analysis, commentary, and context from around that troubled nation. Today especially would be a good time for journalists around the world to start paying close attention to Pakistani blogs.

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Blogs come up yet again, including microblogging. Should newspapers engage in blogging/microblogging? They're a great way to get quick and dirty information from distant places, in situations that you con't place reporters easily. But blogs are unverified... do you use them? How?