Posted: 27 June 2009 1003 hrs
WASHINGTON: Pop star Michael Jackson's death is being seen as a watershed event for the Internet with a website, TMZ.com, scooping "old media" and millions around the world finding out about it online.
TMZ – a joint venture of Time Warner's Web portal AOL and Telepictures Productions – left more established media outlets in its dust, publishing the first reports on both Jackson's hospitalisation and on his death.
News of the sudden demise of the "King of Pop" rocketed around the Web at cyberspeed based solely on the TMZ reports, spread by posts on micro-blogging service Twitter, Facebook status updates, instant messages and emails.
"Increasingly, people are turning to Twitter and social media, Facebook in a big way, to just talk and share ideas and feel that they're connected to other people in moments of joy and crisis," said Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and new media professor at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Other media outlets eventually confirmed the TMZ reports and Web surfers around the globe turned to their favourite websites for news or to YouTube to watch Michael Jackson videos or post their own tributes.
"Michael Jackson's death was clearly a seminal event," Yahoo! said.
Yahoo! News "set an all-time record in unique visitors with 16.4 million people, surpassing our previous record of 15.1 million visitors on Election Day", it said.
The heavy traffic reportedly strained the servers of a number of websites, including those of Twitter, but respected technology blogger Om Malik said reports of an Internet meltdown were overblown. "Only a handful of sites went on the blink," he wrote in a post on his blog GigaOm.
A deluge of search queries for Michael Jackson led Google News, the news aggregator of the Internet giant, to initially believe it was under attack.
"The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack," Google said Friday.
"As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a 'We're sorry' page before finding the articles they were looking for," it said.
The "We're sorry" page tells users their query "looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application" and forces them to type in a series of squiggly characters before it will process their request.
TMZ co-owner AOL, which encountered problems with its instant messaging service, also said Jackson's death was a "seminal moment in Internet history".
"We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth," AOL said.
"Historically, celebrity news prompts a worldwide outpouring with several key consumer behaviours – searching, sharing and reacting to the news followed by online tributes has become the modern way to mourn," it said.
"Princess Diana was the first notable Internet example. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett (the Charlie's Angels star who also died on Thursday) are the latest."
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted a message on his Twitter feed late on Thursday after getting off a plane: "Stepped off a 10hr flight to discover Twitter is essentially a wake for recently departed Michael Jackson."
The Nielsen Co. said Friday that 16 per cent of Twitter messages over the past 24 hours referenced Jackson. Less than two per cent of "tweets" mentioned Fawcett and the Iranian election, which had held the top spot for two weeks.
TMZ, whose most notable previous scoops included Mel Gibson's 2006 arrest for drunk driving and the break up of Britney Spears' marriage, kicked off its coverage with a brief report on Thursday afternoon.
"We've just learned Michael Jackson was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Los Angeles... and we're told it was cardiac arrest and that paramedics administered CPR in the ambulance... and it's looking bad," it said.
It followed up shortly afterwards with: "We've just learned Michael Jackson has died. He was 50."
It wasn't until nearly an hour later that an established media outlet, The Los Angeles Times, weighed in with its own confirmation of Jackson's death.
"We were getting calls from everyone under the sun, established news operations, asking, 'Are you sure?'" TMZ managing editor Harvey Levin told the Los Angeles Times.
"That's such an odd question. We would not have published it if it were not true," he said.
- AFP/so
From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.
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