April 13, 2007 Twittering the Mexico City Earthquake
The first tremor here woke us up at about one, and I didn’t know what was going on until the second one hit, shaking us as we stumbled for our clothes. The earthquake sent us down the stairs and out into the street, waiting, waiting to go back inside. Finally back in the apartment–and on the Internet–we checked the news reports. Nothing on CNN…but [Twitter][twitter] was abuzz with activity.
[twitter]: http://twitter.com “Twitter”
I [posted my report of the quake][2] to Twitter a few minutes after coming inside, but I wasn’t the first to do so. According to [this post from Scoble][3] at least 10 tweets hit the air before mine. We’re still a little worried about aftershocks, but what’s keeping me awake is this new sort of coverage of the quake.
Twitter is still buzzing with reports of the quake, and now [Chris Pirillo][4] is hosting a live, web-based [video conference][5] on the subject. (His reporting is inane, but somehow captivating in the “live” quality of it.)
I’m not sure there’s going to be much more worthwhile coverage of the earthquake at the moment, but there’s bound to be a lot of blogger and media remarks about Twitter’s breaking of the news–according to Scoble’s post, MSNBC covered the quake 34 minutes after the first Twitter.
### What does this all mean?
Two things strike me about this Twitter-driven news coverage (remember, it’s 3am here and I’m dog tired):
* Twitter lets people report the news _fast_–even faster than the folks snapping Flickr pics with their mobiles at the time of the London Tube bombing
* There’s a need for real journalists to cover this fast breaking news
I think most folks will be talking about the first point tomorrow, so let me riff on the second one for a minute. Aside from Scoble’s ticker-like rundown of quake-related Tweets, and a vague AP report about the quake, the only “investigative” journalism going on was from Chris’s live show.
From a technology standpoint, Chris Pirillo’s webcam coverage was somewhat breathtaking: he was broadcasting live video to the net as he carried on a Skype-hosted video chat with a blogger based here in Mexico City. But from a news perspective, it ricocheted between lackluster and downright offensive. Here’s Chris ad-libbing a CNN report of the quake “We have 10,000 dead here in Mexico…. Well, I’m safe here in Seattle….” Clearly, there’s room for improvement, and at least even Chris admitted that there should be someone from a real news station covering the situation in Acapulco, closer to the quake’s epicenter.
At [SXSW][6] this year, I bumped into SF Gate tech writer [Dan Fost][7] and mentioned to him that I thought Twitter offered a lot of usefulness to news outlets looking to provide localized service to their readers. Admittedly, I was thinking of using Twitter as a broadcast medium for newspapers and the like, but this earthquake is proving that there’s also a great need for news outlets to be able to harness technology like Twitter that lets people break news stories _fast_.
I’m going to get in touch with Dan to talk more about these ideas, and I’m definitely going to be posting more on the subject here, too. For now, though, I’m going to get some sleep.
[2]: http://twitter.com/trisignia/statuses/26571621 “My posting on the quake on Twitter”
[3]: http://scobleizer.com/2007/04/12/mexico-city-earthquake-reported-on-twitter-first/ “Scoble on the quake”
[4]: http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/lockergnome/ “Chris Pirillo’s Lockergnome site”
[5]: http://ustream.tv/watch/channel/XNNCxeJ6icRBcYSZm,eDKw “chrispirillo’s Show on UStream.tv”
[6]: http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/ “SXSW Interactive”
[7]: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/search/columnists.cgi?waisdbname=/chronicle/&byline=Dan+Fost “Dan’s articles at SF Gate”
Well, Chris doesn’t pretend to do real reporting. He’s a goofy guy. The part of the call that you reported on, though, was a parody of how CNN or other mainstream news would cover it.
It was pretty clear pretty quickly that there wasn’t much damage or tons of serious injuries. I’m sure that might change a little bit as we hear more from areas closer to the epicenter.
Now, if it were stronger, say a 6.9, and it were closer to Mexico City, then you’d see a different tone used I’m sure.
The hard part is knowing where to post information, or how to find it.
Twitter can help with early reports, though. I knew about the quake several minutes before the USGS was reporting severity.
Hi Robert, thanks for your comment.
Yes, Chris was parodying CNN–I can’t imagine their real coverage would be much better, frankly–but I still think there’s a big opportunity here for folks to to some real reporting about breaking news like this. It could come from bloggers or traditional media; I just happen to think that trained journalists are better-suited to asking the right sort of questions and framing the matter in the right light. (Though this is by no means true in all cases–look at the softball coverage of Bush’s leadup to the war.)
The question of how to find the news is an interesting one, and I guess subscribing to Twitter and keeping an eye on the Twitter aggregators is a start, but I don’t think having 3,000+ friends on Twitter, like yourself, is a way to productively gather newsworthy items or filter these news blurbs, but maybe you’d disagree with me?
I’ll write more after coffee tomorrow–my girlfriend’s telling me to quit with the loud typing–but one things for sure, the field’s still ripe for some innovation in how news is gathered/shared…
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