I Found Out About Michael Jackson on Twitter Way Before You Did
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Today was a very strange day. Learning that two of my childhood icons had died in the same day was oddly disturbing. Guess it truly marks the passage of time. But what made it even odder, was that in both instances I learned about the deaths on Twitter.
Sad as it is, we knew that Farrah Fawcett was sick and so I think the surprise was less. Michael Jackson however, was a shocker. And shockers spread through Twitter like wildfire.
The first tweet posts about Michael Jackson being rushed to the hospital appeared about 2 pm on the West Coast. TMZ.com broke the news. Like any educated person, I started looking at my “trusted sources” for verification – NY Times, CNN, LA Times, anyone? Nothing. Then TMZ and Perez Hilton posted that MJ was dead as well. Peter Shankman aka @skydiver posted:
Stopwatch is on – if TMZ/Perez are right, then All three cable nets missed by over 30 mins and counting…
And that’s exactly what happened. The cable nets, the wires, and the city newspapers were all scooped by TMZ, Perez Hilton and the Twitter community. The news spread quickly, and despite warnings by a conservative few to wait for confirmation, most on Twitter believed that Jackson was dead before those who waited for more traditional media to catch up. By early evening all things MJ were top trending on Twitter having knocked Fawcett, Iran and all other news pretty much off the page. Twitter search scripts were showing 15% of all posts mentioned Jackson, while swine flu and the Iran election at their peak never quite reached 5%.
Of course, one takeaway from those stats is that the folks on Twitter care a lot more about celebrity news than hard news. Perhaps. Or maybe shocking news makes us all try to find a way to connect with others, to help make sense of something that is hard to understand or accept.
The other part of this is that for many of us, Twitter has become a primary news source. Without the freedom of access to and on Twitter, we might never have known the truth of the Iranian elections. Citizen journalism can work. And it can be an awesome thing.
A Twitter friend posted that she thinks TMZ broke the news first because they’re willing to pay more for news. Had a ring of truth about it to me. The access to and spread of news feels more and more like the Wild West.
I don’t have answers, but I can tell you that today raised more questions for me about where journalism and “news” are headed. It feels a bit like Pandora’s Box doesn’t it? That lid is never going back on.
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I think that TMZ broke the news because they are not bound by the ethical conventions of mainstream media. They were first because they didn’t necessarily wait for official confirmation. I don’t know if this is good or bad but it’s definitely the way of the future.
Will this be one of those circumstances like when Princess Diana died, where we can remember exactly where we were when we heard the news?
A colleague and I were in the middle of a new biz presentation, showing our new client (yes, we won the account) a live demonstration on the power of Twitter. And as we pulled up the screen, everyone in the room saw the tweets in real time that MJ had died. Weird to find out in such a social media kind of way.
You are right — it’s a whole new world.
Really good post. Thanks Indra.