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Remember how remarkable it seemed several months ago when a plane sat down in the Hudson River and the first news and photos of the crash came from Twitter? Then the fly ash spill in TVA's Kingston plant was covered first on Twitter. That was about the time that articles about how the old media just didn't get digital media started appearing.
An economic meltdown that dumped publishing and media into a period of hard times along with the rest of society came next, bringing a series of new articles and speculation about how media was going to survive and adapt. Newspapers are closing or moving to web only operations, or just struggling along hoping the weather the economic situation.
Media was big news again with the Iran election. Many mainstream media outlets were getting their news from blogs, YouTube, and Twitter. With journalists scarce in Iran, the "organized" media outlets were struggling to get the story by following what they could from the people on the ground who were tweeting and uploading video to YouTube.
Which brings us to the celebrity deaths in the past week, particularly the death of Michael Jackson. TMZ a gossip site with a reputation as trash, broke the story of Jackson's death. Tweets went out within seconds and the quest for news on the topic was immediate and overwhelming. But nobody wanted to take the word of TMZ. News people wanted to hear from The LA Times or some other big media outlet that they considered "trustworthy."
That's a long lead-up to the topic I want to discuss. What are people thinking and saying about the media and the reporting of events regarding Michael Jackson? Here are a few comments.
Pauline from webgrrls reports that she was at the nail salon. In Cyberspace Behavior when Celebrities Die she said,
I was at my local nail salon when the headlines on television caught everyone’s attention: Michael Jackson passed away. As I sat in my massage chair getting a pedicure, I automatically reached for my phone, but unfortunately had no Internet service in that area. I received texts and made a phone call to a friend, while looking up at the television screen to see the news unfold. Other women around me pulled out their phones to call and text the news at a frantic pace. While the shock was palpable in the salon, I started thinking about what was going on in cyberspace.
I first heard the news from Twitter. I told my two grandchildren and they both immediately called their mothers to tell them. As soon as the calls were finished, they started texting friends. But, like Pauline, my thoughts went immediately to how the story was being reported. We had Ryan Seacrest on the radio in the car—oh, the things you must listen to when driving your grandkids—and he was hesitant to confirm TMZ, he quoted CNN's more tentative reports that it was a coma for several more minutes.
Not to make less of people's memories of Michael Jackson, but I was interested in the social media aspect of the story from the very first.
TMZ breaks news Michael Jackson is dead; does that also spell the death of traditional media showbiz coverage? from TampaBay.com:
It also raises yet another challenge for traditional news outlets, still scrambling to keep pace with a younger pop culture press moving quicker to break and advance the hottest showbusiness news.
Early in the reporting, people attached caveats to the news. At Written, Inc's Michael Jackson dead, the comment was,
Ooh, it's turning into a really bad week for celebrities - if the report from gutter-grabbing celeb "news" site TMZ.com is true.
At BNET, Catherine P. Taylor wrote Michael Jackson's Death Illustrates How Much Media Has Changed. Her points, which I abbreviate here, are:
1. That, unfortunately, the notion of confirming a story is becoming quaint.
2. That almost everyone wanted in on the story in the name of traffic (I suppose you could include this blog in that … go ahead).
3. That if real-time search has a business model it’s in these huge, spiking news stories, particularly news stories with a heavy commercial angle. While there’s no real commerce to be had in the Iran protests, nor should there be, the sudden interest in a dead celebrity’s entertainment output should mean dollar signs for media.
4. That user-generated content shows the problems with the TMZ
