Michael Jackson death a TMZ scoop, online event
Agence France-Presse | 06/26/2009 11:39 PM
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WASHINGTON - Pop star Michael Jackson's death marked a coming of age for the digital era as a website, TMZ.com, scooped the rest of the world's media and millions around the world found out about it online.
TMZ, a joint venture of Telepictures Productions and Time Warner's Web portal AOL, was the first to report both Jackson's hospitalization and death, leaving more established media outlets scrambling to catch up in its wake.
News of Jackson's death rocketed around the Web at cyberspeed based solely on the TMZ report, spread by posts on micro-blogging service Twitter, Facebook status updates and instant messages.
The heavy traffic reportedly strained the servers of a number of websites, including Twitter, but they mostly held up under the heavy load.
"Today was a seminal moment in Internet history," TMZ co-owner AOL said in a statement. "We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.
"Historically, celebrity news prompts a worldwide outpouring with several key consumer behaviors -- searching, sharing and reacting to the news followed by online tributes has become the modern way to mourn," it said.
"Princess Diana was the first notable Internet example. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett (the Charlie's Angels star who also died on Thursday) are the latest."
AOL said news of Jackson's death coincided with its plans to perform a "routine" software update to its AIM instant messaging service.
"It proved not to be," AOL said. "There was a significant increase in traffic due to today's news and AIM was down for approximately 40 minutes."
Google Trends, a service which tracks Web queries, showed a huge spike in traffic for the search query "Michael Jackson died," describing it as being "on fire."
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told The Los Angeles Times that the site was receiving up to 5,000 Jackson-related messages per minute at its peak, slowing down performance.
"We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke," he said. "This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the US presidential election."
Jackson's demise shot past the Iranian election on the list of most popular topics on Twitter as news of his death ricocheted around cyberspace.
The top two "trending topics" on Twitter were Jackson-related within hours of his death, pushing Farrah Fawcett down to number three and the Iranian election down to number five.
"RIP MJ," "MichaelJackson" and "Thriller" were among the so-called hashtags being used by Twitter users to group messages about his death.
Users of social-networking site Facebook quickly created new pages in his honour, with a page called "Michael Jackson RIP" notching up more than 28,000 members in just a few hours.
TMZ, whose most notable previous scoops included Mel Gibson's 2006 arrest for drunk driving and the breakup of Britney Spears' marriage to Kevin Federline, kicked off its coverage with a brief report Thursday afternoon.
"We've just learned Michael Jackson was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Los Angeles ... and we're told it was cardiac arrest and that paramedics administered CPR in the ambulance ... and it's looking bad," it said.
It followed up shortly afterwards with: "We've just learned Michael Jackson has died. He was 50."
It wasn't until nearly an hour later that an established media outlet, The Los Angeles Times, weighed in with its own confirmation of Jackson's death.
"We were getting calls from everyone under the sun, established news operations, asking, 'Are you sure?'" TMZ managing editor Harvey Levin told the Los Angeles Times.
"That's such an odd question. We would not have published it if it were not true," he said.
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