During the impassioned debate on same-sex marriage over the past few weeks, something else interesting happened.

It wasn't the big turnout, rivaling crowds at high school state championship games, for a public hearing on LD 1020 at the Augusta Civic Center.

Nor was it the state Senate's first-pass approval of the bill to legalize gay marriage in Maine.

It was the expanding ways in which your news is being delivered.

Just as hundreds of people were inspired to speak out on gay marriage, news organizations were inspired to take further leaps into new media.

You could watch some of the 11 hours of the public hearing live online. You could see news breaking at a blog's pace or at the speed of 140 characters on Twitter (the growing "micro-blogging" service). Meanwhile, the evening TV news and the next day's newspapers never felt more redundant.

We all know that newspapers and other "old media" are just a few meteor hits shy of extinction because of outdated business models and the Internet.

But these new techniques are long-overdue steps. They may not ultimately save old media, but at least will point it in the right direction.

The Maine Campus, the University of Maine's student newspaper, earned the Scout's badge for preparedness on the day of the public hearing at the civic center. Web editor Will Davis and two other staffers (one unpaid) set up a live online video feed on UStream.com, a service that lets users create streaming video channels for free.

You may have seen it because media organizations (including this newspaper) put up the live feed on their Web sites.

Davis and his crew also provided live updates on @TheMaineCampus, the paper's Twitter account.

It was a daylong hustle, and "I was surprised it came together," said Davis, a 19-year-old freshman.

Issues such as getting (and keeping) the video stream up and finding a reliable power source caused problems. But the UMaine crew must have done something right. The numbers from UStream.com indicated that as many as 53,000 people watched the hearing feed at some point.

"I was surprised no other news organizations were going as far out as we were," Davis said.

A self-described news junkie who plans to stay in the game after graduating, Davis said technology has made journalism both harder and easier. It's easier to break developing news as it happens, but the media can get wrapped up in scooping each other, he said.

Feeding into that frenzy is Twitter, the much-discussed (and dissected) service that allows people to answer the question: "What are you doing?"

For news organizations, that question has become: "What's happening now?"

The Press Herald, along with the Lewiston Sun Journal, The Portland Phoenix and broadcasters such as WCSH (NBC) and WGME (CBS) were among the Maine media that published updates throughout the hearing via Twitter. In another first step, many news outlets agreed to tag their updates with the phrase "MarryME," to allow for better aggregation of news from the hearing.

For Matt Wickenheiser, the Press Herald's State House correspondent and a Twitter rookie, it was a first. Sort of.

"It wasn't too hard, all in all, just a slight extra step. And I think it added something to the day," he wrote in an e-mail.

Wickenheiser spent his day constantly going back and forth, taking notes for a story and Tweeting (yes, it's a verb now).

"I had tons of material that I knew wouldn't be making it into print, little snippets of information that I could easily grab from my notes and throw up on Twitter," he said.

Keeping the updates straight-to-the-point seemed to work. The @PPHNewsNow Twitter account – created for the hearing – picked up followers throughout the day, he said. (Wickenheiser also supplied updates to @pressherald, the newsroom's main Twitter...