June 25, 2009 will forever be the day that Michael Jackson died. The man called by some reports as “the most famous man in the world” if not certainly one of the most famous and successful musical talents in the world, passed away at the age of 50 from an apparent cardiac arrest. In the process of doing so, he literally pushed the earlier tragic death of another celebrity “below the fold” of the front page. That would be one-time “Charlie’s Angel” Farrah Fawcett, who succumbed after a long battle with cancer, at age 62.
Of course, either of these two news stories are remarkable enough to occur by themselves on any given day–but both happening on the same day, made it almost surreal in the newsroom that I spent my working day in.
But for the second time in this day, perhaps a more amazing thing (at least to me) occurred when I realized that I had learned of the breaking news, but this time not from one of the many traditional news sources that are at my desk.
Let me try to put that in a little better perspective. I have at my desk wire services from the Associated Press (the biggest there is), ABC News, and a couple of other smaller ones. I also have five television sets tuned to the major networks and CNN. I routinely also have four or five web sites open, ranging from the New York Times to an industry gossip blog called “TV Newser”.
And despite the size of that “river of news” that flows in front of me all day long, the first word of the deaths of two very notable people actually reached me via a device that is just a week old, announced by the sound of toy horn. That would be on the screen of my iPhone 3GS, displaying Twitter messages from @cnnbrk and @HarveyLevinTMZ
My colleague Ann Nyberg has called Twitter the modern-day equivalent of the old style teletype machines that were the standard for news delivery when she and I both entered the news business. The first true news bulletin I remember getting this way, was when I learned that President Gerald Ford had pardoned former President Richard Nixon of all crimes he may have committed in office. The bulletin moved on a Sunday in September of 1974, when the United Press International (UPI) teletype starting clanging its bell in the newsroom of my first radio station job.
That little 35 year old trip down memory lane was necessary, because most people under 40 have likely never heard of UPI, as it really ended being a wire service in 1999, selling out to it’s larger rival, the Associated Press (AP). UPI was, for the most part, done in by changes to the news business at the time. (The UPI lives on, mostly in name only, at a website that syndicates content to online publishers.)
One could be forgiven for thinking that word of today’s celebrity deaths could be seen as a watershed moment for another change to the news business–just how word of major stories is now flashed around the globe. It certainly hasn’t been the only recent time that the Twitter service has been integral to delivering–and also gathering–a major news story.
The unrest and demonstrations following the recent Iranian election has shown how Twitter has created the equivalent of a “wire service”, but this is one that anyone can participate in–as either a reader or a writer. As messages poured out of Iran from both professional and impromptu journalists, the paradigm shift was truly palpable. (Twitter even powered a viewer backlash when CNN was taken to task for being underpowered in its first weekend coverage of the situation in Iran by the #cnnfail movement.)
Now just days after that moment, comes yet another “stop the presses” kind of moment when the celebrity news website TMZ.com is so far ahead of everybody on the breaking news that most every news organization around the world (including the one I lead) repeats TMZ’s first reports from 4:30pm eastern time, that Michael Jackson has been rushed to the hospital after suffering a cardiac arrest. (That is, if they even bother to report the initial story from TMZ at all.)
It is perhaps the most massive “re-tweeting” of a news exclusive by other news organizations. In a matter of minutes internet traffic soars and in under an hour, TMZ beats everybody again with the first word that “the King of Pop” is dead at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Many newsrooms turn cautious and wait until other “major” news organizations, such as the LA Times, before going with the story.
Twitter’s servers become so slammed with use that the service turns off some features so that it doesn’t completely crash under the load. This comes just nine days after the US State Department asks Twitter to delay a scheduled weekend maintenance event to help preserve communications with those in Iran.
So the way I look at it is that in the space of ten short days, there were two budding revolutions that were Twittered.
One is still unfolding as a country tries to find it’s future in the world.
The other now seems quite a bit further along, as we may have found the future of how we will get the first word on what is happening in that world.