Jan

Twitter scoops major media outlets on Hudson plane crash

Posted by Kim Published in Uncategorized

Who had the best coverage of this week’s plane crash? For timeliness- Twitter. Below the snippet, the article covers the coverage pretty thoroughly.

Worth noting: Flight Captain C.B. Sully Sullenberger has a Facebook fan page with 197,077 fans as of this post.

… a US Airways jet made a water landing on New York’s Hudson River, shortly after departing from La Guardia Airport. I found out about it via a Wall Street Journal e-mail alert that was sent out at 3:52 in the afternoon, about 25 minutes after it happened, and I immediately checked my regular breaking news sources. Nothing on Google News. CNN.com had a brief story that repeated the details of the WSJ alert, and a grainy screen capture from a local television news report, showing a partially submerged plane surrounded by boats. I followed the link through to the ABC affiliate but there was no live video or even an older video report.

But this is where it gets interesting.

A colleague in San Francisco IM’d me a Flickr link. It was a mirror of a picture that had been posted to Twitter by someone on a passing ferry, and it told a story that the professional news organizations had thus far missed:

People had survived the crash. Scores were standing on the wing, or exiting one of the front doors into a gray rubber life raft, or the inflatable escape slide. I counted 34 on the wing, and 11 on the boat/slide. At least three of them were wearing what appeared to be the yellow life jackets stowed under the seats — the ones in the safety demonstrations that require passengers to connect straps and pull down a red tab or blow into a tube to inflate.

>snip<

There was more Twitter information, too. Plane-related tweets accounted for eight of the 10 top “trending topics” (Hudson River, MSNBC, US Airways, LaGuardia, etc.)

via Plane lands on the Hudson, and Twitter documents it all.