The latest example of citizen newsgathering: At 9 am this morning, there was a stabbing murder at Teany, the teahouse owned by Moby in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Yet by 3:41 pm, as Rachel at FishbowlNY reports, no local papers had posted any news on their websites. The only news came via several blogs — including a first-person account from a blogger named Sarah, a piece and a photo (which I’ve used above) of the crime scene on Gawker, and a note on Gothamist. Granted, this isn’t terribly in-depth newsgathering — the Gothamist posting merely pointed to the Gawker entry. But the comments are quite interesting, including a note on Gothamist by a neighbor:

i live in that building and it was horrible to leave my apartment this morning to find a pool of blood outside of the doorway and then have to climb over the railing to avoid the murder scene.

Yipes. Perhaps predictably, at both Gothamist and at Sarah’s blog, the commentors wound getting in long, numbing arguments about hipsters, yuppies, and whether the Lower East Side still has any “edge”.

(Thanks to Rachel Sklar for this one!)