Indonesia issued a tsunami warning after a strong earthquake struck in the area of northern Sulawesi, the country’s meteorological agency said via a telephone text message on Monday.

The quake had magnitude of 7.7 and struck in the Gorontalo area of Sulawesi island at a shallow depth of 10 km (6.2 miles), the agency said.

Although the news isn’t good, I think it’s a fascinating piece of reporting because it is essentially a relay of a text message. To be clear, the quote above is the entirety of the article’s text. Reuters basically took the text message, re-processed it into sentence form, and published it. It’s succinct and fact dense in a way that reporting that cites people as sources really isn’t.

Imagine if all press conferences had to be limited to 140 bytes or less.

Update: Reuters has since expanded the story.