actually, to be fair, I was alerted to this story on Twitter by someone who linked to this thread. So yes, in this case, we did get the story from NSC (although if you're being *really* pedantic, we got it from PA who got it from NSC before we managed to put the call in - I imagine they will have got it from Twitter too).
Gwylan's right in that we don't spend all our time hanging round NSC, but I do dip in occasionally. Not talking to people on the internet to get stories would be like refusing to use the telephone - madness! And I make sure whenever I know a story has come from another online source that it gets the credit.
Fair enough, although I'm surprised that this story didn't come up in a police ring-around.
Twitter is an amazing source for news: I get about 50% of my leads from Twitter these days, how times have changed.