To the raging (and ultimately tautological) debate over who or what qualifies as a “journalist” in this age of blogging and social media, we can now add a new question: does “journalism” require “journalists” at all?

One of the biggest and hottest news stories last week was Texas state senator Wendy Davis’ epic 13-hour filibuster of an anti-abortion bill, which has catapulted her onto the national political stage, spurred talk of her running for governor and turned her pink and green Mizuno Women’s Wave Rider 16 sneakers into a hot item on Amazon. But it would be hard to say who, exactly, “broke” the story.

The “story” literally “wrote” itself in real time, thanks to YouTube channel featuring a live video feed from the Texas state house. Even as Davis was speaking, before anyone with a laptop or a reporter’s notebook took down a word she’d said, the live video of her dramatic, one-woman stand had gone viral, attracting millions of viewers nationally and spawned multiple Twitter hashtags. Though bloggers and accredited media outlets did eventually pick up on the viral heat and social media buzz while Davis was still talking they were, quite literally, late to the story.

Some credit for breaking the story does belong to the Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization that had, months before, gained access to the live video stream provided by state-controlled cameras in the state house and repackaged it into a YouTube channel. While the feed remains available on the state’s Web 1.0-era website it was the YouTube channel created by the Tribune that provided the viral tools to turn a local story into a national phenomenon. But it would be a stretch to say the story broke because of the Tribune’s “reporting,” at least as that term is traditionally understood.

This was not a case where someone happened to point a camera at something that turned out to be newsworthy, realized what they had, and put it up on YouTube or Twitter. That process — event, documentation, dissemination after the fact — whether carried out by an amateur or someone being paid to be there, would fit just about any reasonable definition of “journalism.” What happened in Texas played out on YouTube in real time while a crowd-sourced “narrative” was emerging around it on social media nearly concurrently, which was later picked up and amplified by the “press.” Not sure where that fits on the spectrum of definitions of “journalism.”