Twitter during a plane crash – and implications for news
Dan Thornton | December 22, 2008The ability to instantly update was highlighted at the weekend, when Mike Wilson (@2drinksbehind) tweeted ‘Holy fucking shit I wasbjust in a plane crash!’
As he continued to post updates it emerged that it was the second crash he’s experienced, some of his experiences and possible causes (flagged up as such), and the fact that Continental Airlines wouldn’t serve drinks to the passengers once they were all safely away from the plane.
Silicon Valley Insider has screenshots of the whole thing, and there’s interesting commentary from Loic Le Meur, Jeff Jarvis, Mashable, Laurel Papworth, and The Blog Herald - and that’s just sources from my RSS feeds!
What’s interesting is how Loic, for example, points out spokespeople weren’t able to give out any details on live TV news, despite the fact we could all follow Tweets from somewhere going through the experience – and Pete Cashmore at Mashable points to the changing roles of news and newsrooms.
Apparently Mike has now been interviewed by Fox News. And apparently the chairman of Continental Airlines was on the replacement flight!
He’s also gained a lot of new followers as a result of the experience.
The implications for news reporters and news sources are becoming more and more important with every piece of breaking news on Twitter. Mike was able to send messages and images from the crash site – and could have also shot live video, all from his mobile, and all distributed instantly online.
For the visceral experience of an event, nothing can compete with that.
Where news sources still provide value is in finding the context of those individual experiences – for instance, when a spokesperson appeared to say they couldn’t say anything, where was a reporter asking about Mike’s messages?
We’ve already had
I wrote about how news sites have to change back in July. At that time, the LA Times was the first new source I’d seen to reference Twitter. The fact it’s got a Twitter account probably helps. During Mumbai, both the BBC and CNN were referencing it alongside Flickr.
And there has been plenty of reaction by readers of traditional news sources, as well as from the blogosphere. Many have questioned whether instant updates can be trusted, and whether they’re the sort of thing we expect from traditional news sources.
Part of this, I suspect, is from people who don’t use Twitter and therefore don’t have the human filter as a way of referencing trust. (Incidentally, David Armano’s diagram is one of the most succinct and effective ways of explaining Twitter I’ve seen!).
The Human Filter by David Armano (Logic+Emotion)
And the other part is that news sources are still slowly developing from their coccoon and haven’t fully worked out how to implement Twitter and the meaningful context and analysis on top of it in a readily apparent way.
The sooner websites integrate Twitter, Flickr, Qik, etc, the sooner we can see the value they layer on top.
