Here's a good example of social media being used to organise content around a live event: the BBC has been using the social timeline service Storify to build narrative around the horrific events witnessed by reporter Paul Danahar as he accompanied UN monitors to the scene of a massacre in the Syrian village of Qubair.

Through Storify, users can create a timeline linking individual pieces of content from around the Internet, and add their own commentary to wrap the content into a story. In this case the BBC sourced content from its own website and the journalist's posts on Twitter, but other news outlets are using Storify to collate public reaction and content from the wider web (see MSNBC's new piece on Rodney King's death, or the Toronto Star's story on last weekend's Radiohead stage collapse).

Storify clearly fits the bill for news outlets trying to curate content around big news, and I wouldn't be too surprised to see an acquisition from outside of the traditional silicon valley social media businesses - CNN perhaps?