Global General

Event shows changing media nature

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-05-04 08:21

NEW YORK - A soldier in Afghanistan learned about the death of Osama bin Laden on Facebook. A TV producer got a tip from comedian Kathy Griffin on Twitter. A blues musician received an e-mail alert from The New York Times. And a woman found out as she absently scrolled through the Internet on her smartphone while walking her dog.

In an illustration of how 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 Vujevich, a student at Immaculata University in Pennsylvania. "It's amazing to see how social media played a part in it."

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

Jaime Aguilar, a Denver musician, was at a friend's house watching HBO when he saw the news alert on his smartphone.

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 commanding officers, but from Facebook. Angie Scharnhorst of Kansas had an early morning plane flight and if she wasn't carrying her smartphone while walking her dog at 2 am, she said she probably wouldn't have heard the news until later in the day on Monday.

Ashlee Edwards, a content producer for the CBS affiliate WBTW-TV in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was watching The Tudors with a friend when she saw Griffin's tweet urging her to "turn on CNN now" because the president was about to make an announcement.

Abroad, the mediums of choice were much the same. Perhaps most prominently, one Twitter user told the story before the world knew what was happening - he lives near the compound in Pakistan where bin Laden was killed and became, in his words, "the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it".

Sohaib Athar, 33, is a computer programmer who was startled by a helicopter clattering in the early hours on Monday. He tweeted about it, and soon the sole helicopter multiplied into several and gunfire and explosions rocked the air above the town. Athar's tweets quickly garnered tens of thousands of followers as he apparently became the first in the world to describe the US operation to kill one of the world's most wanted terrorists.

Elsewhere, Shari Mai of Middlesex, England, said through Facebook that she heard the news via the Financial Times. Marina Ch of Moscow learned it through Facebook and The Associated Press. Monique Taylor, an Australian, said she was in London and the story was all over Facebook.

In Washington, it was before 10 pm on Sunday that many Washington-based reporters were told to get to work because the president would speak. They were not told why.

At 10:25, Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld tweeted: "So I'm told by a reputable person that they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn."

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. Others, including ABC, were more definitive. Fox News Channel was joyful.

Associated Press