Juvenile offender Delara Darabi was executed in Iran this morning, despite outcry from hr orgs: http://tinyurl.com/cqa7ks (via @amnesty).

Chalk up another win for Twitter, despite the obvious human rights catastrophe inherent in this post. Of course, no one should be surprised that Iran executes juvenile offenders - or that the country does so in secret. But what’s surprising is that no major media outlets had this story; in fact, major Western media seemed to be staying away from the story, in some cases waiting a full day (or more) to put the story online. I got it, via Amnesty International USA on Twitter, hours before I saw it anywhere else and more than a full day before it went up on the New York Times website. It’s certainly true that the Twitterati don’t need to do the sort of fact-checking that an AP or Reuters reporter needs to do before posting a story. And it’s certainly true that secret executions in Iran might not be the easiest stories to verify. That said, I wouldn’t have expected such a discrepancy in the time between when Twitter had it and when mainstream news sources did.