When a Plane comes down and Twitter is up
Some weeks ago there was a lively discussion on the reporting and / or journalism quality Twitter allows, influences or stands for. My position was: without referencing, twitter is nothing. Today, a plane went down at the Hudson River in NYC.
Within seconds it was reported by several Twitter users, for example @manolantern, by @trappedinabay, by @jdackerman and by @jkrums.
Janis Krums said to be on a ferry which was getting as close as possible to the watered plane and trying to rescue it’s passengers. He took a picture which will make it around the world during the next hours, sent it via TwitPic into the world. Even though TwitPics servers did not survive the massive amount of requests, the picture was republished by several others [I include it here, too, will change that to a reference link later on when TwitPic is back].
Some of the most interesting pictures I saw yet are to be found at the Flickr stream of user GregoryLam, who started taking pictures obviously within seconds after the plane watered (notice the wave trails behind the plane). They are also interesting to all kind of media, since they are published under a Creative Commons 2.0 BY license, which means: you just have to name the photographer and might use the pictures for whatever purpose you like to.
But what happened on Twitter after the crash? Loads of people reported that others reported that a plane fell into Hudson River. Most of them did not even reference sources or started chatting about it, so their content was mainly meaning- and worthless - twitter search was flooded with plane/hudson posts within 30 minutes, it was hard to find the original posting. There was no journalism on twitter, after the reporting had ended/was replaced by those who do traditional media.
To me, this was the most interesting tweet of the day. Oh, and by the way, it’s good to have a good positioning system.
The New York Times sent a News Alert about an hour after the plane went down. It’s content: flight route, no. of passengers and cabin crew, expected reason for the watering. Twitter was not mentioned.