Last week, the popular Dutch singer Andre Hazes died. (That’s him pictured above.) The news came out just before noon, and within a few minutes, the country’s mobile-phone carrier noticed something strange: The number of text messages instantly doubled. People were spreading the news themselves, instantly, via SMS.

The incident led phone-pundit Mike Masnick to wonder whether this could be a new paradigm for how news is spread. Rather than wait for everyone to tune into their newspaper or TV show or web site, how about having reporters provide news in a format that readers can easily re-broadcast — using SMS, email, or whatever? As Mansick puts it:

From a news organization’s perspective, then, the opportunity is to package the news not in a way that simply attracts more readers, but to be easily disseminated outward by those readers. As the E-Media Tidbits article notes, for the news of Hazes death, a news organization could have sent: “Here is a message to forward, a picture, and part of a Hazes song attached,” and then just let the power of social distribution take over.

It reminds me — to cite a more depressing example — of 9/11. I was at Flatbush and Atlantic that morning, with a crowd of people in the street, watching the buildings burn. When I looked around, I noticed that virtually everyone had pulled their phone out and was talking to someone else, describing the freakish, horrifying scene. Then I suddenly realized: The mobile phone was acting as a sort of de facto news agency, spreading on-the-spot information faster than CNN or Fox.