"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Note that the "off-topic" guidelines contain two exceptions. The first sentence provides an exception for interesting new phenomenon. The interaction between social media, traditional media, and the police in this case is interesting and new enough to arguably qualify. The "cover it on TV news" sentence says it is probably off-topic, not that it certainly is.
I'd argue that a post-event analysis of those interactions would be justified. However, much of what was posted here really wasn't. There was comment threads with minute-by-minute updates of events, links to images of suspects and links to live police radios. I personally wouldn't consider any of that to be the type of stuff that should be submitted to HN.
I think the thing that must be remembered is that almost nobody who reads HN reads it in a vacuum. I'm willing to bet that almost every user here has an account on another website which is more suitable for discussing current events. HN isn't in competition with these sites, and it doesn't need to have their breadth. This is a site for engineers and developers about technology.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Note that the "off-topic" guidelines contain two exceptions. The first sentence provides an exception for interesting new phenomenon. The interaction between social media, traditional media, and the police in this case is interesting and new enough to arguably qualify. The "cover it on TV news" sentence says it is probably off-topic, not that it certainly is.