Geek Squad founder reports breaking news with iPad, iMovie

According to TwinCities.com, Robert Stephens, resident of Minneapolis and co-founder of Geek Squad (now owned by Best Buy), was driving to work when he witnessed a rather large gas explosion. Without hesitation, Stephens grabbed his iPhone 4 and started recording the event whilst driving towards it, "...to see if anyone had dialed 911 yet."

Once Stephens had captured the source of the explosion, he drove to a nearby parking lot, transferred the footage from his iPhone to his iPad 2 (we recently covered how to do this using Apple's USB Camera Connection Kit), edited the footage, added a map, subtitle and voiceover describing the incident and finally uploaded the film to YouTube and iReport. Stephens then tweeted (with a few stills) permission for others (including the media) to use the footage, and before long, his breaking news was getting coverage on CNN and MSNBC.

Stephens says, "It was iPhone to connection kit to iPad to iMovie to CNN," apparently all within around four minutes.

According to Stephens, had this all occurred prior to the release of the iPad 2, he would simply have uploaded the raw footage from his iPhone, but since he had the iPad 2, he was able to do all the editing using Apple's new iMovie app for the iPad.

Stephens admits he's no journalist, but thanks to the the iPhone and iPad (and iMovie) he was able to make a rather slick "citizen-journalism" report with a professionalism akin to the pros.

Check out the full video after the break.