Why watching TV will never be the same after Bin Laden

Posted by Justin Goldsborough | 4 comments

We reached a tipping point Sunday night. One that will go down as comparable to Walter Cronkite’s TV newscasts during World War II,  the 2000 presidential election coverage online, CNN.com’s iReport and Janus Krum’s picture of the U.S. Airways plane crash in the Hudson River.

Last night we witnessed a permanent change in the way we as Americans communicate and share the biggest news events of our time:

• From when the tweets began about a special announcement from the president
• To when President Obama announced Osama Bin Laden had been killed
• To when people flooded the streets to celebrate and began checking in at the White House and Ground Zero

All signs pointed to the fact that we were witnessing change. This was different. And from now on, the way we watch news will be permanently integrated between on TV, online and on our social network(s) of choice. Stories like Bin Laden’s death have taken on a life of their own. And public consumption of them via just one channel is no longer enough. Our expectations have changed.

Consider the following progression of event’s Sunday night:

• Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, tweets “POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time”
• Networks announce on TV and via Twitter that Obama is going to make a special announcement
• Retweets and Facebook shares of the announcement time begin
• A few minutes before the scheduled announcement, major networks break the story that Bin Laden is dead
  • On CNN, Wolf Blitzer actually tried to wait and let Obama announce it even though he knew what the news was, but then John King came on and blurted it out (one of few funny parts of the night)
• Conversation blows up online — Mashable says there have been more than 12 million Bin Laden tweets per hour over the last 24 hours
• New York Times online publishes the first story recounting the news and Obama’s announcement
• Networks show video of people gathering around White House singing Star Spangled Banner
• Osama Bin Laden is dead Facebook page goes viral and has 120,000 likes just an hour after the announcement
  • Now at almost 450,000 likes
• People begin checking in at Ground Zero, posting pictures to Twitter and Facebook
• New elements of the story continue to be divulged on TV, online and on social networks

During the 2008 election, it seemed like the way we watch and share news was starting to change. This year during the Super Bowl and the Oscars, I noticed I was missing out on part of the story by not being on Twitter during the broadcast.

But Sunday night, we didn’t have a choice. The story was integrated across mediums for us by the networks and our peers. It was a story that everyone in the United States was watching. And there were millions of “reporters” across the country sharing pieces of it.

That’s how these news stories are going to be told from now on. The multichannel convergence of media is becoming mainstream. And more than ever before, it’s becoming apparent that the news itself — told from a multitude of official and citizen sources — is what the American public really cares about, and in fact, expects.

• Did you notice a change Sunday night?
• Will you ever watch a big news story again without picking up the computer?
• How much of a role did social media play in the coverage of Bin Laden’s death that you consumed?