Earthquake in England - Live
February 27th, 2008 by CiaranAt 00:56am on the 27th of February 2008 a tremor measuring 4.7 was reported on the east cost of England (map). As yet there no reports of damage.
Don’t worry we are fine all here at Weeno Media and only slight tremors were felt here in London. What is interesting here is the speed and channels through which the news was reported. Here is a run down of the how the news was reported to me.
00:56AM - I felt slight tremors and noticed my desk shake slightly.
00:57AM Twitter users also report felling the shaking and tremors around the UK
00:59AM @breakingnewson reports the first mentions of the earthquake on twitter
01:00AM Robin Blandford relays the news to me via Google talk
01:02AM Video conversation reports appear on Seesmic but no footage.
01:10AM User reports appear on Jaiku
01:18AM First reports appear on Sky News.com
01:21AM First reports appear on news.BBC.co.uk
01:39AM First reports appear on UK.Reuters.com
As you can see Twitter is becoming an amazing source for breaking news online and beats any of the traitional media by over 20 minutes. Another example of this was they the story of Pakistans Government block on youtube that was badly implemented and took it down for the whole world. This was first picked up on by Twitter users and reported on by Darren Clark editor of the BBC Technology News website via the news he got from Twitter
So is 2008 the year of the citizen journalist or just the citizen breaking news journalist? I would say for breaking news yes but everyone still turns to the traditional media sources to get the full story once things have settled down.
What do you think?
UPDATE:
An interesting update is this video which appeared on youtube about an hour after the tremor. It is from MBC news on Metaverse TV which is a TV station that operates inside the virtual world Second Life.
February 28th, 2008 at 7:25 am
[...] an example of how one UK blog experienced the flow of information (note the speed and the channels [...]
February 28th, 2008 at 7:56 am
i would just like to say that my room wall was shakin vigrously i actually thought it was going to collapse in on me. so this small earthquake could have a done alot of damage evn though it was 5.4 apparantly on the richter scale. another warning has come that there might aftershocks taking place in the next 24hrs to 48hrs.
source: http://www.bbc.co.uk
May 18th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
[...] Earthquake in England - Live [...]
August 9th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Earthquakes are always horrible. i fear a lot from them
August 10th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Just a minor quake:) Hope everyone will be fine!
August 12th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
yes a minor one indeed…Imagine what happens in Indonesia when they experience quake around 9 magnitude
August 17th, 2008 at 8:45 am
I had also faced 8.5 but survived:)
August 17th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
9 would be really horrible Dueces
August 19th, 2008 at 6:13 am
Oh God keep you in His safety!
October 17th, 2008 at 10:03 am
My friend slept through her whole house shaking violently!……. lucky to be able to get such sound sleep I say and shee lives in Lincoln near the epicentre!!
November 9th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Hey, very interesting post.
My written English is not so good so I write in German:
“Lieber den Spatz in der Hand, als die Taube auf dem Dach.”
Yours sincerely
Terrier
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:44 am
I agree , citizen journalists have become more and more effective in disseminating news. In fact CNN is encouraging people to provide information to submit their input a significant events. The most current event that citizen journalists made contributed a lot is the Mumbai Terror attacks.
I think people still turn to the traditional news media when everything settles because they have better information gathering capabilities and sources. So people turn to them to confirm if the news being spread is indeed true and accurate
December 18th, 2008 at 10:51 am
hi,
Thanks Dino for your insights, i agree with you that people having great capabilities of gathering information.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Very old but amazing
January 31st, 2009 at 3:34 pm
[...] http://www.weeno.ie/blog/earthquake-in-england-live/ [...]
March 26th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
A great point, and look how over a year ago Twitter was still the first place to report the news. Amazing!
March 26th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
I have quite a few friends that live in England and it was nice to be able to get news of the event so fast.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:26 am
I think it is great how the new social media of the web is overtaking the traditional sources…. Look at the Hudson plane crash and the earthquake in Rome. I like to get my news uncensored and unvarnished!