It doesn’t take much to see where news is breaking these days.

In the latest instances of a growing trend, a shooting in Washington, D.C. Wednesday, and explosions in Jakarta Friday were reported on Twitter by several accounts more than 15 minutes before traditional media reports.

Not only is mainstream media losing its edge, but the “breaking news” phenomenon in general is losing its value, according to Frédéric Filloux of Monday Note.

Filloux writes:

Therefore, the equation becomes clear-cut: either the Mainstream Media (MSM) recapture breaking news by twittering, or microblogging in some fashion, or the crowd will take care of business. Examples abound. As the internet pundit Clay Shirky recalls it in this TED presentation, the recent (last May) earthquake in China was widely reported by inhabitants using their cell phone for taking pictures, video and sending tweets. “The BBC got their first wind of the Chinese quake from Twitter, says Shirky. Twitter announced the quake several minutes before the US Geological Survey had anything online. The last time China had a quake, it took officials three months to admit it had happened”.

In other words, despite the immediacy of the 24/7 news cycle, traditional outlets are being trumped by a real-time Web — Twitter users reporting from the scene, Web sites that aren’t afraid to run on a single source, and blogs that may have questionable ethics yet break news anyway.

Exclusives are hard to come by, and when someone does break news, it’s usually seconds or minutes before the next outlet reports it (if Twitter hasn’t already). That means that MSM outlets are losing the edge on breaking news they’ve held for so long.

Without quick adaptation, they may lose viewers and readers altogether, who will go elsewhere for their breaking news fix. And that could be a problem.