By Jonathan Mathias
This day last week, for the first time in as long as I care to remember, I was completely transfixed by the unfolding events of a TV news story – the untimely death of Michael Jackson. What really struck me, in retrospect, was that I didn’t immediately search Google in order to find out more. No, at this time, all that would do for me was old media – and I wasn’t the only one. All my friends and family were glued to BBC News 24, and I’d hazard that an awful lot more people than usual picked up a newspaper last Friday.
The story broke on the relatively small celebrity gossip website TMZ, and it was from there that other news agencies and services got their tip off. But it seems that people just wouldn’t accept MJ’s death as fact until other, more established outlets, such as the LA Times, BBC and CNN, confirmed the reports.
The below graph, made on alexa.com, shows traffic to various news sites at the time. You can see that TMZ had a marked peak on the 25th, when the story broke, while the other more mainstream sites peaked or experienced sustained traffic the following day (including Twitter, as the public conversation continued to flow).
Although this event demonstrates more than ever how online and social media has changed the way news spreads, it’s also clear that the traditional media is a long, long way from being written off. People continue to revert back to more established news sources to confirm big stories, perhaps you could even argue that stories carried by these outlets are much more trusted, valued and remembered.
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