Miranda Devine: terrorists face media blitz • Miranda Devine • The Sunday Telegraph • April 21, 2013 12:00AM

THE epic rolling story of the hunt for the Boston bombers has been an extraordinary exercise in 21st century media.

Technology that didn't exist even five years ago proved equal parts invaluable tool and unhelpful complication, and the crucial role of traditional media was affirmed. The story lit up Twitter from 2pm Sydney time on Friday _ midnight on Thursday, Boston time _ when journalists, such as the reporter from Boston TV station WCBV, began tweeting: "Major police scene at MIT in Cambridge _ MIT police chief confirms one of his officers is down."

A few minutes later, the Massachussetts Institute of Technology campus newspaper The Techtweeted an eerie aerial photograph of the scene where just over an hour earlier campus patrol officer Sean Collier, 26, had been shot dead. The photo showed police vehicles parked hastily, one door open, headlights blazing. Five uniformed officers were standing around what looked to be a large pool of blood. An hour later, MIT confirmed the officer was dead.

Suddenly Twitter was alive with multiple reports from police scanners, tracking live the police chase through the suburbs. Links came through to websites carrying live feeds of Boston police and emergency services scanner.

Anybody could hear the chaos.

In Watertown, where it was close to 2am, residents began posting extraordinary videos of the gun battle. Reporters tweeted what they were seeing, hearing and smelling.

At this point, 4pm Sydney time, there was nothing on Australian television screens, not from ABC's 24-hour news channel, nor from Sky, CNN or Fox. It felt like an enormous story, but as yet there was no official confirmation of a link to the Boston Marathon bombings.

Soon after, cable channels woke up, with live footage from Watertown, showing a young man in a tracksuit lying face down in the middle of the road, surrounded by police with guns drawn. He turned out to be one of several bogus suspects.

Residents posted pictures of the scenes outside their homes. "Crashed cop car with all windows shot out in our driveway," Andrew Kitzenberg tweeted.

A seamless synergy was emerging between traditional and social media. Professional journalists armed with mobile phones used Twitter as a broadcast medium from various scenes of drama around Boston, alongside videos and pictures from witnesses. Official sources, like the Boston Police Department, joined in with their own Twitter updates.

Newspaper websites began pulling together live rolling coverage, complemented by reporting from specialist reporters working their contact books.

About 5pm our time, reported the connection the world was waiting for: the two suspects police were hunting over the MIT and Watertown shootings were the same suspects wanted for the marathon bombings, in which three people died and scores were injured. Information that a few years ago would have been the sole domain of busy newsrooms or emergency situation rooms was being played out live on the world stage.

Suspect One was reported dead after a shootout with police and Suspect Two was on the run.

This is where the mainstream media showed its mastery of the technology.

Newspapers such as The Boston Globe and our own Daily Telegraph made sense of the chaos with stories on their websites, confirming facts and correcting misinformation.

Twitter showed itself to be useful as a research tool and broadcasting medium but only when filtered through this medium of authoritative journalism.

By 7pm Boston police were telling residents of Watertown to stay indoors and had released a picture of Suspect Two, "armed and dangerous" as SWAT teams moved from house to house in search of him.

By 9pm the was tweeting the suspects were "from Russia region near Chechnya, lived in US at least 1 year".

Names followed of brothers: , 19, still on the run, and Tamerlan, 26, dead. Mainstream media dispatched reporters to interview friends and family members and profiles of the brothers were quickly compiled, ethnic Chechen Muslims living in the US for a decade.

By 11.03am Sydney time yesterday, after one last fearsome gun battle in Watertown, Boston police tweeted: "CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody."

In moving scenes on TV, hundreds of bystanders clapped and cheered police vehicles.

Job well done, for police and the mainstream media.

Of course in a fast-moving story, mistakes occurred but were quickly corrected. Armchair critics condemned media inaccuracy and pined for an era when news was published hours after it occurred.

But modern technology means the public is now privy to what used to be the internal messiness of news before we served it up neatly in your morning newspaper. It was that technology which sparked events on Friday, after a calculated decision by law enforcement to release images of two men, Suspect One in a black baseball cap, and Suspect Two in a white cap.

But while technology provided those images, one remarkable individual helped police identify the suspects among the thousands of people pictured at the bombing scene.

Jeff Bauman, 27, was immortalised in the most telling image of Monday's bombing, both legs blown off below the knee, alongside his cowboy hat-wearing saviour, Carlos Arredondo.

Arredondo applied the tourniquets that stopped Bauman bleeding to death. Bauman survived to tell police what he witnessed as he waited for his girlfriend to finish the marathon.

He could describe the young man wearing a cap and sunglasses who looked at him before dropping a bag at his feet, which later exploded.

Once the two suspects were identified for the first time, it wasn't hard to spot them in the reams of images captured that day.

They stood out because they were walking calmly from the scene, unlike the distressed people nearby, many who were rushing back to help the injured.

If you look closely, perhaps you will detect a smirk, a look of satisfaction on the suspects' grainy faces amid the carnage.

In the end it seems it was their callousness and lack of humanity that brought them to justice.