Is the cat out of the bag?

Unless you’ve been hiding under a stone (or in a bin) for the past week, you’ll have heard the story about catwoman by now.

If you haven’t, we’re not talking about Michelle Pfeiffer unfortunately, nor Halle Berry. In fact, to avoid any confusion, we’ll refer to her as catbinwoman from here on in.

Catbinwoman is in fact a grey haired lady from Coventry who was caught on CCTV placing an unsuspecting feline in a bin.

Due to a strategically placed CCTV camera outside the cat owners’ residence, catbinwoman was caught in the act of petting the animal before picking it up by the scruff of its neck and throwing it in a wheelie bin.

The cat was eventually retrieved by its owners and you can read the story in more detail pretty much anywhere on the web.

What makes this story particularly interesting however, is that the cat’s owners put the CCTV coverage up on a Facebook page called Help find the woman who put my cat in the bin, and the news story to some extent then turned into one about social media, as opposed to being simply about the event itself.

Twitter was of course abuzz with the topic before very long, with every man and his dog (or cat) jumping on the bandwagon, whether to offer outraged opinion, bewildered bemusement or simply to crack a few jokes. (You can also now follow @catbinlady’s very own tweets, but, be warned, this may be a ‘joke’ account..)

The question is, how has social media impacted upon this whole story?

Personally, I first picked up on the story through twitter. If it wasn’t for the huge, snowballing response on twitter and Facebook, would this really have been such a big story?

Looking at newspaper coverage, the crux of the story has become less about a woman committing an act of animal cruelty, and more about the social media storm that was caused as a result.

Event takes place – social media picks up on it – traditional media reports on the fact that social media picks up on it.

Is this the shape of things to come?

If so, is this simply another example of newspapers losing their grip and social media forging ahead in the battle to provide timely and relevant news? Is the cat out of the bag; has social media proved itself to be the only news we need?

We’d love to hear your thoughts…