Tragedy at Virginia Tech: The Blogosphere Reacts
It’s pretty difficult to not at least make mention of the terrible and deeply troubling incident at Virginia Tech today, which as of this writing has left at least 33 dead and a stunned nation wishing it could go back to squabbling about Don Imus and other relatively small issues (like online media cult-ery).
Search Marketing Gurus points out that Newsvine was the first social news site to pick up on the story. Its affiliation with Associated Press allowed it to get the news out so quickly, I suppose. There’s some more chatter about how Newsvine was able to “scoop” Digg on this story, which feels somewhat strange – to me, at the least – to focus on in light of such a brutal and gut punching news event.
Bloggers Blog does a great job of covering the day in terms of how the blogosphere first brought some of the story to light (can you even imagine sitting in your dorm room and writing a piece called Madness on Campus while all hell was breaking loose?).
Wired’s Threat Level attempts to calm emotions surrounding attempts to identify the now slain shooter as the “Live Journal blog of a particular 23-year-old gun nut in Virginia.”
“Mobile phone journalism” as a rising asset in the citizen journalist’s toolkit is another angle being picked up, by the likes of Center for Citizen Media Blog and others. Poynter Online declares that today is “destined to become one of those cornerstone events in citizen journalism and participatory media.”
Boing Boing presents a particularly chilling photo of a French class held hostage to fear, and links to a lot more coverage on Wired, including cell phone video footage.
In late breaking news, CNN reports that “…police have a preliminary identification of the man who methodically shot and killed at least 30 people on the campus of Virginia Tech, but they are not yet ready to release it.”
Update: Mathew Ingram points out that social networks are now an important part of national stories: ” One Facebook group set up in memory of those killed had more than 17,000 members within hours of the shooting and now has over 96,000 members and 9,000 “wall” posts or messages.”
It’s now being reported that the shooter was a 23-year old Virginia Tech senior from South Korea. The possibility of a second shooter is still being investigated.
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April 17th, 2007 at 3:47 am
Hey Eric - yeah I didn’t mean to come off as sounding unsympathetic of the situation (I’m still watching the coverage of it right now), I simply saw the story where one site seemed shocked that Newsvine could beat Digg to a news story and felt compelled to comment that people shouldn’t be reading Digg for breaking news…I tried to put as little about the incident that brought this up as possible, but obviously it’s a little hard to avoid today.
I just did a new post based on the coverage i’m watching where geraldo is searching facebook for possible suspects, no joke. I think this is pretty ridiculous.
Anyway, sorry if I offended anyone with the Digg/Breaking News post. Clearly this is a tragedy and it wasn’t my intent to play it down or make light of it.
April 17th, 2007 at 8:50 am
It’s amazing how transparent the development of the story was from social to mainstream media. You can see journalists from NBC, NPR, etc, using blog comments and facebook forums to try to find eyewitnesses.:
http://searchviews.com/archives/2007/04/virginia_tech_shootings.php
Also, it should be noted that the false identification in Facebook (as reported by Wired) was almost immediately corrected by other students participating in the forum.
April 17th, 2007 at 10:17 am
MG - I didn’t find it offensive, and in fact I think I was reacting more to the emotion of the story than anything else. I for one love looking at social news sites and how they differ from one another, so I think that aspect in this case helped to drive home (for me) how horrific this story is, that I personally wasn’t able to look at it that way.
April 17th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Kate, as both you and MG relate, the mainstream/traditional media is now looking to new/social media (blogosphere, social networks, etc.) more than ever before in helping to shape news coverage. The enormity and immediacy of this story probably does help bring a new era of journalism to light, as Poynter Online alludes to above.
April 20th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
The basis of the crazed shooter’s character will be(if we truly find out)an upbringing filled with all kinds of abuse; mental, physical and sexual.
The formation of what his mind has gone through is fully based on horrible actions that was noticed by strangers and should of been obvious to the family members whether they were the cause of his actions or not
thank you
April 22nd, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Soo, it seems this is the case from what we know about his background. I wonder if this terrible event will help people to step in with other disturbed young people. Unfortunately in the United States the tendency is to not interfere.
September 6th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
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