Twitter: Plane Crash in Denver
Jennifer Ross @Jenn was on a plane, tweeting away, when the plane ahead of hers ran off the runway: Pushed back – airport shutdown due to “an emergency” on a flight taking off to the north A couple of pages of updates later – THEN heritage media starts reporting it. I wonder what United Airlines…
Jennifer Ross @Jenn was on a plane, tweeting away, when the plane ahead of hers ran off the runway:
Pushed back – airport shutdown due to “an emergency” on a flight taking off to the north
A couple of pages of updates later – THEN heritage media starts reporting it. I wonder what United Airlines think of this comment while watching a Continental flight burning on the runway?:
United could have been kind and left ch 9 on, but it’s been off since boarding 🙁 #dia
Channel 9 is the pilots channel with – if I remember correctly – webcams of the runway and nose of the plane. I love it but it gives some people the heebiejeebies.
2DrinksBehind (Mike Wilson) was actually ON the plane. Apparently. *carefully watching for media fibbers* Experience says Jenn is trustworthy, 2DrinksBehind doesn’t have much social currency on Twitter yet, not many tweets, or followers …
But he does have a foto 🙂
Yes I would misspell too, during a plane crash…
BreakingNewsOn is well worth following, on Twitter.
here’s the USA Today story:
DENVER (AP) — A Continental Airlines jet taking off from Denver went off the runway and caught fire Saturday night, forcing passengers to evacuate on emergency slides and injuring nearly 40 people, officials said.
No deaths were reported, but 38 people were taken to hospitals, said Kim Day, Denver International Airport manager of aviation. No one was reported in critical condition.
The cause of the accident was not immediately known. The weather in Denver was cold but not snowy when Continental Flight 1404 took off from Denver International Airport for Houston at around 6:20 p.m. local time.
Ground crews put out the flames quickly, said airport spokesman Jeff Green. The 112 people on board made it out on through slides on the Boeing 737.
The plane was carrying 107 passengers and five crewmembers, said Continental spokeswoman Mary Clark.
Denver Health spokeswoman Kalena Wilkinson said seven people were taken to her hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. Five people were in fair condition at the University of Colorado hospital, a spokeswoman said.
The accident closed the airport’s west airfield and caused delays of 40 minutes, Day said.
Twitterati are everywhere. Remember, News is not created by journalists, it is reported by them. We are in the News, around the News, reporting the News, delivering the News, receiving the News, commenting on the News…
I really wish I could agree with you Mumbrella but …
… it’s wrong on so many levels.
First, I didn’t follow Jen. Someone told me about her. My social network brought me the news, hours before the TV did.
Second even when TV does bring the news it is – maximum – a minute or two news. Hours late. Like #mumbai my post I sat on top of heritage media waiting for indepth coverage, hell anything. Most I got at midday was “more at six tonight!”. Like I will wait six hours for an update?
Three journos contacted me asking for Twitterers #mumbai and Flickr people. I gave over the main contributors and didn’t get so much as a thanks. 🙂
Heritage media is dead. I’m sorry – really I am. I don’t make the news, I just report it.
Channel Ten’s income dropped 25% last quarter. You remove 25% of your salary and see how you fare. Newspaper ads have dropped %14-16 quarter on quarter. There aren’t that many quarters left – many US towns are without a newspaper. And so on.
I had a discussion with the guy who set up News.com digital strategy in 1996 and we agreed that heritage media would survive until readers could a) write the news b) distribute/filter it and c) comment on it. Also classifieds would need to be reinvented. That time has come.
No matter how many people you follow, when your Twitter screen, Facebook page, whatever fills up with the same news story, it’s been broken to you. And it will definitely be before heritage media reaches you.
Of course news portals will adapt online. But heritage media – non online – will not survive in it’s current form. No new years resolution from me. 🙂
…and once again, I see this collection from Australia.
I tell ya, Laurel, we Americans are so behind in much of social networking, not to mention e-government.
Go on then, I’ll bite…
Twitter is fantastic – it’s an excellent narrowcast medium. It helps me do my job better every day. But this regular comparison between Twitter and “heritage media” does neither one a service because it implies there is some kind of epic struggle going on where there will only be one winner.
That’s simply not the case. The two do different things.
In the case you mention, yes Jenn’s followers who happened to be on Twitter at that very instant will have found out first. But that’s not mass media.
In most disasters, most people aren’t going to be a follower of somebody who is there.
We’d all have to follow thousands of people before the odds were in favour of that. And then we’d need some kind of filter to decide what was important, otherwise we’d never keep up with the stream.
Imagine trying to decide the important fact if two thousand people were all speaking to you at once.
That’s what the traditional news does every day – it makes judgements on behalf of its readers/ listerners/ viewers on what they are likely to want to know, and more importantly what to leave out.
Please, please, please, can our new year’s resolution be to move on from the new-media-good, old-media-bad debate?
And a happy Christmas, by the way.
Cheers,
Tim – mumbrella
It may have taken you several hours before you saw it on the news. But I’d suggest that was probably because you weren’t watching a news channel (or doesn’t that count as “heritage media”? If not, what’s your definition?).
Have you come across Sky News? That’s channel’s the joint work of several taditional media owners over here. It’s 24 hours, seven days a week. No waiting for hours for two minutes.
Their rolling coverage of Mumbai, for instance, was outstanding. Ten minutes of watching that would have given you far more colour, context, analysis and, yes, on-the-ground reporting than ten minutes of reading Twitter.
The same goes for CNN, BBC, Fox News, CNBC, Bloomberg and the various others that are available to anyone who cares to subscribe to Foxtel.
Complaining that they only had an update on a general entertainment channel is a little like logging onto domain.com.au and wondering why they’re only telling you about property. You have to be looking in the right place.
Intersting you had that conversation 12 years ago. It’s taking a long time to happen, isn’t it? That corpse still seems to be twitching pretty good.
Somewhere I bet there’s still a TV zealot who predicted in 1950 that this new medium was going to kill radio. I’m sure he’s muttering to himself: “Any day now, any day now…”
This is not a one-or-the-other situation. Newspapers made room for radio, which in turn made room for television. What’s happening now is that the established media is once again making room for a new medium.
Predicting the death of old media is so 1996.
Sorry? Why should I subscribe (pay $$) to Foxtel when I can watch those newscasts for free on the ‘net? *puzzled* someone from Twitter linked me to CNN India, and I watched the news there. Australia should be so lucky to have such a media service. *snorts* Foxtel charges you to watch rebroadcast of what we were watching for free. Now you know why the subs are so low for Australia.
The stuff from Flickr (Vinu) and the blog helplines were more indepth. By that, I mean connected. Not ‘rumours of some starlet caught up in a bathroom’. You might want to relook at your idea of a quality media outlet?
Twitter is not content based SN but a distribution one. The links that came out of Twitter were amazing – and far superior to anything from $100 a month subscription TV. Stop thinking of Twitter as an ‘endgame’ – it’s a ripple network. Rippling out to blogs, wikis, facebook etc. If your friends in your social network aren’t breaking news to you before MSM do, get more switched on friends!
Keep paying your money to cable TV walled gardens, if you want. I’ll utilise my social networks to bring me links. Not just because I’m a cheapskate. Heh. But because they know what I like. 🙂
I’m also puzzled. If you watched CNN India online, you didn’t have to wait hours to see the news. Like it or not, you were watching traditional media.
And I’m not sure what you mean by “in depth”. I’m not thinking so much of starlets in bathrooms, more of watching live as terrorists’ bodies were thrown out of the window when the building was stormed by the authorities.
In that particular case, Twitter simply doesn’t do the same job.
But has this debate moved on to one of paid content versus free? At least it’s slightly less crude than old-versus-new.
Interesting that Tim/Mumblella brings up the birth of TV as I have just done an extensive post on the very issue he is referring too.
TV from cradle to the grave – what we can learn at it’s birth which has some great quotes from the BBC Yearbooks in 46/49 as they compare TV with Radio and Radio with newspapers. A relevant one here is “With good lighting at the transmission end and the right adjustments at the listener’s end, the television picture becomes more than a picture – you know that you are watching real people doing real things” ah the ideals of the post war broadcaster. Today of course we have to endure endless layers of filtering, advertising, nationalism and general ‘sensationalism’ with our ‘pay-to-be-blinkered’ news that to get news from the ‘horses mouth’ – those affected by the event – is where it is heading. News will evolve sure, but it will be to its advantage to go beyond a few out of date references to emails, sms’s or tweets.
I would like to finish on one of UKs most respected reporters in an ‘inspired’ post, fighting for the return of trust in what TV should have become…Jeremy Paxman: How can we trust TV
“There is a fight going on for the survival of quality television right across this industry. The recent skirmishes and scandals have not gone our way. As an industry we need to lay out much more clearly what we’re doing and why. Let’s spend less time measuring audiences and more time enlightening them.
Despite the last few months, I do not believe that this uniquely powerful medium has been taken over by charlatans. But we ought to acknowledge that parts of it are in danger of losing their redeeming virtues. We need to be open. We need to admit when we make mistakes. We need treat our viewers with respect, to be frank with them about how and why programmes were made, to be transparent.
We need, in short, to rediscover a sense of purpose.”
LOL!
Here she goes again. This is one of the reasons why I’ve pretty much reduced my time on this blog: laughable pronouncements like, “heritage media is dead”.
So what if they lost ahecofalot of money? Same goes for plenty of other businesses in plenty of other industries. Take automakers, for instance. But I tell you this: they ain’t going extinct. At least a handful will stick around.
As for that guy in the Denver plane crash – if you think that’s news, well, you just have to be bloody kidding.
yeah yeah yeah, dear brave anonymous.
News Results for Twitter Denver plane crash. Includes New York Times, Telegraph, CBS News, blah de blah.
So either its News or it’s not. If it is News, you could follow it first on Twitter, second on my blog, third in MSM. Heritage Media cos it’s THIRD.
Or it’s not News in which case, give the Washington Post a call?
Oh, and merry Xmas! Heh.