It was around 10:15 pm in Turkey on July 15th when messages started to go around about “strange events taking place in Istanbul and Ankara”. A terrorist attack, some said. A coup attempt, said others. It quickly became clear that the latter were correct.
Within the hour, it had been confirmed by Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Soon after, the state broadcaster was taken over and an anchor forced to read the coup leaders’ message of martial law. The official channels of news were shut down, and the world was left, in the most part, to trawl social media to find out what was going on.
When Seung-Hui Cho opened fire at staff and students on the campus of Virginia Tech in 2007, graduate student Jamal Albarghouti didn’t run. In an act which is now a mainstay of breaking news events, he pulled out his cameraphone and started filming.
Is “old media” dead? Call off the funeral arrangements, according to a survey of more than 200 reporters and editors by Oglivy Public Relations.
Oglivy PR found that while 54 percent of respondents agreed that new platforms such as social media were growing in importance for managing newsrooms, 72 percent still believe that traditional media outlets are the most trusted news sources.
Rukmini Callimachi of The New York Times is arguably the best reporter on the world’s most important beat—terrorism and jihadists. Here’s how she does it.
When big news breaks, eyewitnesses always have the best stories, the first-hand accounts, the as-it-happened photos that news organisations crave. And now, thanks to social media, reporters can track down and contact someone at the scene of an event in an instant, even on the other side of the world.
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