Over the past decade, news in general has changed drastically in the way it is presented to the public. Back in the day typically most news was proclaimed through broadcast outlets such as prominent news television programs or on the radio.
Now, most news is proclaimed over social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook. A perfect example of this was the death of infamous R&B singer Aaliyah in 2001. I was 10 years old when this occurred, which was exactly ten years from today.
I remember distinctly first hearing this breaking news on the television. First it was all over the big news channels such as ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS, then traveled to MTV and E!. Most of the information regarding the plane accident and the tragic situation in general was diffused to the public on MTV.
Ten years ago there was internet, but the social network was not nearly as popular as it is today. Twitter wasn’t even created until approximately 6 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
Now a days, it seems that news , especially celebrity and entertainment news, spread like wild fire on twitter. For example, we all know about the recent heart wrenching news of music icon and legend Whitney Houston’s death recently. I was first introduced this news through twitter. I actually first saw it through a tweet by Rihanna proclaiming the following:
Rihanna was one of the many artists as well as fans to announce their sorrows and give their respect to the deceased legend. According to blackenterprise.com, tweets regarding Houston’s death got up to 1000 tweets a minute.
Mashable.com presented an article regarding Michael Jackson’s death and the impact is had on major websites such as google, yahoo , and Facebook.
Basically the article just spoke about how in this day and age more people turn to the internet when hearing about a prominent occurrence in the world, this in particular being the death of pop icon Michael Jackson. It showed how search engines were used to look up information on different websites, and showed that statistically Facebook significantly beat out twitter contrary to of what many people assumed.
All in all it is obvious that overtime the way we obtain news changes drastically. It is interesting to think about how advanced our society has developed over time technologically wise, and to try and predict how journalism will continue to change in the future.
