In 1991 there was a short-lived coup in Russia — and I almost missed it, because I didn’t have cable television at the time. CNN was running round-the-clock coverage, but I only found out later, by glancing at newspaper headlines, that Boris Yeltsin had climbed onto a tank and stared down the coup plotters.

In 1997 Princess Diana was killed in a car crash, and I learned about it from CNN.com — I happened to be in front of the computer at the time of the crash, and the news came in as I refreshed. It was the first major world event that I learned about from the web.

Today Iran is going through its greatest political upheaval since the Shah died, and the best sources for Persian news are from YouTube, Twitter, and Andrew Sullivan, who has turned his blog into an absolutely indispensable clearinghouse for all things Iran. Sullivan’s aggregating content from literally thousands of sources; it’s raw, unfiltered and “unverified” per the traditional canons of journalism — but the sheer quantity of reporting verifies itself, and captures a more realistic “you are there” feeling of events than Edward R. Murrow ever dreamed.

Iranian protesters equipped with cameras and cell phones are, in every sense possible, making the news.

A while ago I wrote about the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and how the ongoing collapse of the newspaper industry leaves a gap in the field of investigative journalism: The beat reporter who knows City Hall inside and out isn’t getting paid in the new post-newspaper era. (For that matter the foreign correspondent got lost in the budget cuts quite a while ago, which is part of why the best reporting from Iran is on YouTube.) I don’t know whether investigative reporting can always be crowd-sourced, but the way this week’s top story is being circulated could be a glimpse into the future of journalism.