NEW YORK - 'LADIES and gentlemen, Michael Jackson has just died,' the woman called out breathlessly upon boarding a Manhattan bus, moments after the news had broken. Not a word was spoken in response. But nearly every passenger reached for a Blackberry, a cell phone, whatever device was at hand.
This generation's Elvis
TMZ quoted a source inside the hospital, and turned out to be right. But there were plenty of false reports circulating across the Web that mainstream news organisations had to chase: Rumours of actor Jeff Goldblum falling off a cliff, Harrison Ford falling off a yacht and, on Friday, George Clooney in a plane crash.
Another challenge the mainstream media faced was presenting both sides of Jackson himself, and balancing the polarities of his story.
WASHINGTON - A DELUGE of search queries for Michael Jackson led Google News, the news aggregator of Web search engine Google, to initially believe it was under attack, the Internet giant said on Friday.
Google, in a blog post on the company website, said that 'millions and millions' of people around the world begin searching for news about the pop star on Thursday as reports emerged about his hospitalization and death.
'People are already texting about it, putting it up on Facebook, remembering his greatest moments,' noted Delmar Dualeh, sitting in the back. At 17, he confessed, the news didn't really move him emotionally. He was too young to recall the 50-year-old entertainer in his prime. But he was fully engaged in the cultural moment. He hurried the conversation along so he could get back to texting.
In Iran, people speak of a Twitter uprising. Was this the first major Twitter celebrity death? Because it wasn't just how many people first learned of Jackson's demise but what they did once they found out.
'Once you knew the news, there wasn't so much more to know - the rest is all comment,' said media critic Jeff Jarvis. So, he said, maybe you'd go to your friends instead of the news: 'You might care more what your friends say than some analyst.'
Mr Jarvis himself tweeted the moment he heard of the death: He noted that Iran's spiritual leader should be grateful to Jackson because the story wiped Iran off the day's news agenda. 'That was re-tweeted a lot,' Mr Jarvis said.
The company said news of Jackson's death generated the most tweets per second since Barack Obama was elected president, and more than twice the normal tweets per second from the moment the story broke.
Plain old texting, Mr Dualeh's choice, had its largest spike on AT&T'S network in history. Nearly 65,000 texts per second were sent, the company said - more than 60 percent over normal volume.
And on Facebook, 'sharing of all types went up - including wall posts, comments, notes, posted links,' wrote spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin in an e-mail. 'Status updates in particular saw an increase of more than three times the amount than usual.' Some posters were cynical, but many more were grief-stricken, like Jackson fan Scott Friedstein, an administrative assistant who lives in Brooklyn.
'There will never be another like him, ever,' Mr Friedstein wrote. 'The word 'superstar' is tossed around a lot, but no one personified the term, lived and breathed it, and delivered like he did. To all the people who liked Michael Jackson when it wasn't cool to ... I feel for you.'
Facebook said there were no internal reports of the site slowing from too much traffic. But there were slowdowns or outages on other sites. Google said the spike in searches related to Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack.
Experiencing slowdowns were the websites of ABC, AOL, the Los Angeles Times and CBS, according to Keynote Systems, an Internet monitoring service. Also experiencing an impact were MSNBC.com, NBC and Yahoo! News.
The initial news of Jackson's death broke on TMZ.com at 5.20 pm EDT (2120 GMT, 5.20am Singapore time). The Los Angeles Times and then The Associated Press confirmed the death just before 6.30pm EDT (2230 GMT, 6.30am Singapore time), and networks then led their broadcasts with the news. -- AP
