Social media, new devices spread news like wildfire

Speed is watershed in coverage of events

5/2/2011

NEW YORK — Illustrating how much the information world has changed, many people learned through media formats or devices that weren’t available a decade ago that the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had been killed.

“It just kind of spread like wildfire online,” said Stephen Vujevica, a student at Immaculata University in Pennsylvania. “It’s amazing to see how social media played a part in it.”

He said he was at his girlfriend’s house and both were on their laptops, when she said that many of her friends had updated their Facebook status to note bin Laden’s death in Pakistan.

Mr. Vujevica went to Google News to find out that President Obama had set an address to the nation and searched other sites for news. He credited Twitter with giving him the most immediate information.

Musician Jaime Aguilar of Denver was at a friend’s house watching HBO when he saw the alert on his smart phone.

A soldier who identified himself only as Carlos from Queens called New York sports radio station WFAN on Monday to note that he and his buddies in Afghanistan learned the news not from his officers, but from Facebook.

Angie Scharnhorst of Overland Park, Kan., had an early morning flight and if she wasn’t carrying her smart phone while walking her dog Ruby at 3 a.m., she said she probably wouldn’t have heard the news until later Monday.

Ashlee Edwards, a content producer for the CBS affiliate WBTW-TV in Myrtle Beach, S.C., was watching The Tudors when she saw comedian Kathy Grffin’s tweet urging her to “turn on CNN now” because the President was about to make an announcement.

It was before 10 p.m. Sunday that many Washington-based reporters were told to get to work because the President would speak. They were not told why. Mainstream news organizations began reporting that bin Laden was dead about 15 or 20 minutes later. Some, such as CNN and NBC, were tentative at first.

The speed of social media struck some as an epochal moment in news coverage.

“If anyone isn’t a believer in Twitter as an amazingly powerful news vehicle, last night should convert you,” tweeted Chris Cillizza of the political Web site The Fix.

Twitter said it had its highest sustained rate of tweets. There was an average of 3,440 tweets-per-second from 10:45 p.m.-12:30 a.m., according to the site. At 11 p.m., there were 5,106 tweets-per-second.

Internet traffic surged above normal Sunday night usage.

Akamail Technologies Inc., which delivers about 20 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, said that global page views for the roughly 100 news portals for which it delivers content peaked at more than 4.1 million page views around 11 p.m.

CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC had nearly 15 million viewers between 11 p.m. and midnight Sunday when Mr. Obama spoke, led by CNN’s 7.8 million. That time on a typical Sunday, the three networks are pulling in 1.7 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Co.

At CNN, which reported at 10 p.m. that Mr.. Obama would speak, it was another 45 minutes until the speech was connected to bin Laden, even as Wolf Blitzer provided some cryptic teases: “I have my suspicion on what the President is going to announce. Probably something we’ve been looking forward to, at least from a U.S. perspective, for quite a while.”

CNN’s John King eventually reported the news.

Mr. Blitzer conceded Monday that he had a pretty good idea what the news would be when sources assured him that the President’s news was not about Libya.

“I didn’t report it because you don’t report something like that based on a suspicion, based on a hunch, based on your journalistic gut instinct,” Mr. Blitzer said. “You’ve got to get confirmation. And you can’t just confirm from one source. You need at least two really excellent sources.”

It’s no longer unusual these days for social media to reflect the first stirrings of a story, said Mark Kraham, chairman of the Radio Television Digital News Association and news director for WHAG-TV in Hagerstown, Md.

Yet he said that conventional media showed proper caution in reporting the story. People would have been offended or hurt if news organizations had reported a story of this magnitude and it turned out to be false, he said.