I will start by saying that Twitter and various social media have obviously changed our workdays top to bottom. We spend our time in council meetings tweeting things, for free, to our followers. We hope they follow those things, and we hope they are better informed as a result.
From a practical point of view, for reporters, particularly those who are at meetings, Twitter is about more than informing the public. That is obviously a key part of it, but it is also about collecting their thoughts; it is sort of a digital notebook for a lot of people. They would leave the meeting, and that is when they interview councillors, the mayor, or stakeholders in the community and put together their full story. They would tweet bits of those interviews as they go, but of course you don't get the full package and the full story until the process concludes, and that is when you find it digitally, in print, or over the air.
Using social media has this twin purpose now: you can instantly inform communities, but it also serves your logistical needs. All you have to do is survey your own Twitter feed and the Twitter feeds of others who are at that meeting, following hashtags and that sort of thing. It improves our ability to do our jobs, even if it makes us go a little crazy with everything happening at once.