People Turn to Internet for Breaking News, Newspaper The Next Day

That happened because it took a while to get everyone out of the tunnels, but also because the Evening Standard got a fast jump on the story, pulled back its so-called City edition, and within 90 minutes of the bombs going off the paper was printing its first bomb terror edition. For its second day in a row the Standard printed an additional 100,000 copies – the previous day it has expanded the print run when London was awarded the 2012 Olympic Games. It had planned a 16-page supplement for the next day, but the bombings took care of that!

The public at large went in droves to the Internet and the most popular site, the BBC, crashed for a while under the volume. Many radio stations went to a mostly talk format, and the television networks, using their 24-hour news networks as the base for their coverage, went all news during the day. The main evening newscasts were expanded, and their viewership doubled over normal days.

London’s national newspapers had the day to prepare for their first editions and their coverage was striking. Many opted to print on the front-page one large news picture (even the broadsheets) with very little verbiage – the picture really speaking more than 1,000 words.

Most increased their print runs – the top selling Sun, for instance, by 10% -- 375,000 copies. In the best journalistic traditions, advertising was dumped and all the space necessary was given to the story. The compact Independent led with 35 pages of coverage, the tabloid Daily Mirror had 34, The Daily Telegraph (broadsheet) and the Daily Mail (compact) each had 24 pages, and the Sun had 23 pages.

ftm background

London: How 24 Hours Can Make Such a Difference! - July 7, 2005
When London learned yesterday at 1245 local time that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had chosen the British capital to host the 2012 Olympic Games, the Evening Standard expanded its print run for its remaining editions by 100,000. That Olympic decision was probably the best medicine that the Standard and UK national dailies had tasted in a long time, and they badly needed it. And then came the horror of the London bombings today.

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But it was the Internet that bore the brunt of the breaking news. Even the subscriber based FT.com, read mostly by the business community, saw its traffic increase five-fold. The BBC accounted for 35% of news page impressions. The Guardian registered 7.8 million page views from 1.3 million unique users, about double a normal day’s traffic and some 25% more than the previous daily record made at May’s UK general election.

US television networks canceled most of their normal programming to report on the bombings for most of the day, and the interests of Americans was prevalent on the UK Internet news sites. According to The Guardian, there were more than 500,000 users from the US to its site compared with 400,000 from the UK. Even in the UK, US web sites scored well with CNN.com and MSNBC.com doing the best, according to Hitwise. Overall in the UK, access to news sites increased by about 50% over a normal day.

For those tuning into the 24-hour international news networks it was obvious CNN was at a distinct disadvantage at the beginning even though its European center and most of its reporting and technical resources are in London. It was competing against the BBC on its home ground with all the resources that entails, and its BBC World simulcast its News 24 channel and domestic news programs for much of the day. Fox had available complete domestic Sky News coverage and so CNN augmented what it could produce itself with a heavy dose of excellent ITN stories, telecasting the ITV evening news, and shipping in reporters and anchors. All could take credit for a job well done.

Arab 24 hour news broadcasters such as al-Jazeera played the story very straight, but, according to The Times, that didn’t stop BBC executives from using the bombings as an additional weapon in their campaign to convince the government to cover the £25 million cost of an Arabic news station broadcasting around the clock. Al-Jazeera itself is launching an English language service next year.

On the media front the tragedy did accomplish one reconciliation. The Evening Standard and London Mayor Ken Livingstone have been feuding for months over a variety of matters, but now they and the British Red Cross have joined together to set up a fund to benefit Londoners who were injured and the families of those who were killed. The Standard itself donated £100,000 to the fund.

There have been many compliments on how well the emergency services did their job – and they did it superbly – but kudos are also due to the media. It is often said that in times of such a tragedy, with the adrenaline running full, it brings out the very best in people, and for the media this was definitely a high. Whether it be the Internet, broadcast/television, or daily newspapers, Londoners, and the world at large, can take pride that a free media served them proud.

These past days, from newspapers literally stopping their presses in mid-run, to the public no longer being passive but rather active participants contributing their videos and stills that could not be matched elsewhere, have marked a dramatic change for our multi-platform media world.

London’s Terrorist Bombings Again Proves How People Turn to The Internet for the Breaking News and Even Though Radio and Television Provide Blanket Coverage They Turn In Droves to the Daily PRINT Newspaper The Next Day

In what must be one of the strangest media quirks of the London bombings, by the time some of the survivors were brought out of the underground stations they found the city edition of the Evening Standard waiting for them describing exactly what had happened.