Also at D11, Twitter’s Dick Costolo talked about the state of the company and platform. That included a bit about the news business. This is from All Things D’s Mike Isaac’s live paraphrasing of Costolo’s on-stage conversation with Kara Swisher:

Kara: Let’s talk about the boston marathon and events like this. Do you have a responsibility here? Are you the new news org?

Dick: About Boston — when events like these happen, my perspective.

In the moment, the horror is very personal. I turned to Twitter to see if friends [like Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley] are safe.

But it’s always been the case that folks are trying to sift through what’s out there and verify what’s true.

The beauty of Twitter today is that when those sorts of rumors surface, the crowd is doing a very good job of sorting out what’s real and what’s rumor very quickly.

We think of ourselves as very complementary to news orgs.

We’re the platform for global information distribution for the people, by the people.

The news orgs are the curators, the editors, the analysts. They do that important work.

Kara: Will you become more of a news org?

Dick: No, I see us partnering more with news orgs to distribute this real-time feed of info, probably working with companies that can help organize that information and dole it out to news org readers.