Old versus new in the battle for a scoop
Around mid morning on Friday 31 July the words Sir Bobby Robson and RIP started to appear on Twitter. It seemed that once again the social web had broken the news of the sad demise of a celebrity. There have been several instances where this happened with the most notable occurrence being the recent departure of Michael Jackson.
According to the online specialists at PR Week, analysis has appeared to confirm that Twitter was first to break the news, if only by a few minutes. At 10.18am Robert MN Harvey was the first to tweet with an update stating that the football legend had passed away at his home in Co.Durham.
The Yorkshire Evening Post website was then hot on Mr. Harvey’s heels with an article timed at 10.22am - the first of the so-called conventional media to publish the story. Two minutes later the news was on Bobby Robson’s Wikipedia entry but it seems that Sky News did not put out the first bulletin until 10.25am, with BBC Radio One adding it to their news programme at 10.30am.
Whilst there will be some that say that this is trivial given that ultimately within a very limited timeframe the main media channels had all covered the story - and to a great extent I would agree with them - one can’t help but think that such a rapid response from Twitter signals the shape of the things to come where scoops are concerned.
Despite still being ‘hot of the press’ so to speak, by the time most channels had started to cover it there were reams and reams of messages already logged on Twitter and not even an hour later friends of mine reported being sent a request to sign up to a Bobby Robson in memoriam site on Facebook.
Whilst the appropriateness and timing of this in itself is another debate altogether, it is indeed a sure sign of the times that news channels which employ some of the keenest minds and best correspondents in the country are being pipped at the post by a freelance journalist sat on his laptop in office at home.
They think it’s all over. It is now.