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Article Michael Jackson's Death - Welcome to the New Media World (Ralph Hanson) On Thursday, June 25, 2009, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz used the microblogging tool Twitter to announce his current status: "Slow morning. No new Iran protests, no new sex scandals. Might have to do some reporting." But by late afternoon, Kurtz and virtually every other reporter on the planet would have put aside the contested Iranian election and a scandal surrounding the South Carolina governor to report on the sudden death of superstar Michael Jackson. For the next two weeks, the death of the self-proclaimed King of Pop would dominate the news industry. But it would also provide stark evidence of the rapidly changing media world we all live in. Jackson was fifty years old at the time of his death, and he had been a star for more than forty years. He has been credited with helping to create the current era of popular music in which stars need to be great dancers and performers as well as being gifted musicians. He also had generated a fandom that transcended age, race, and nationality. Jackson was undoubtedly a superstar in the music, video, and pop culture world. He had sold 750 million albums-that means 2.5 albums for every man, woman, and child in the United States. But in addition to being famous for groundbreaking albums and music videos, Jackson also was famous for his eccentricities and infamous for charges of child molestation. The news of Jackson's death broke in a way that was as controversial as his life. The story of his cardiac arrest and subsequent death was first reported by the tabloid-like TMZ.com, a celebrity gossip Web site owned by two divisions of Time Warner. TMZ's initial post of Jackson's death went up at 5:20 p.m. eastern time, six minutes before the coroner officially declared Jackson dead, and more than an hour before most other news outlets would report the King of Pop had died. Jackson's death led to a ripple that could be felt across the Internet: The average load time for stories at news Web sites doubled. Online fights emerged over whether Jackson's Wikipedia page would list him as alive or dead. Twitter saw a doubling of the normal level of Tweets per second being posted. AOL's instant messaging service went down for forty minutes after Jackson died because of the huge amount of traffic Jackson's death generated. Legacy media outlets, such as the major television networks, were reluctant to attribute to TMZ, looking instead for what they saw as better sources of the news. "There's still this residual . . . instinct to think 'Oh, it's just TMZ, let's wait for the Associated Press or the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times before we can say it's true,'" said press critic and journalist Kurt Anderson. "I don't think in, say, five years, that this will be the case." TMZ was founded in 2005 and is owned by the same folks who own Time, Sports Illustrated, CNN, and People. This was not the first big scoop for the upstart site. It broke the stories of misbehavior by actors such as Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin, and Christian Bale, and many people turned to it for news when Anna Nicole Smith died in 2007. The site has been accused by critics of paying for information, something that is generally frowned on in journalism circles, though the practice is common enough in the celebrity tabloid business. Terrence Samuel, an editor for TheRoot.com, notes that although TMZ is not a traditional news outlet, it got the scoop on Jackson using traditional techniques: "In some ways, despite all the tweeting and Facebooking, what you had here was a very old-time media scoop where somebody had better sources." Rolling Stone contributing editor Touré says that journalists and the public are going to have to get used to getting news from a much wider range of sources than in the past. "The mode of delivery doesn't make it not journalism or journalism," he says. "A tweet can be journalism... TMZ was ahead of the story and they were right. And if that doesn't validate them, what will?" For the next two weeks, news about Jackson's death was unavoidable. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, during the day following Jackson's death, 60 percent of the news coverage was about Jackson. And that does not include the prime-time coverage of Jackson on the broadcast television networks. On the cable news networks, 93 percent of the coverage from the time of Jackson's death on Thursday through Friday night was of Jackson. Although his dominance slipped a bit the following week, Jackson's death was still the biggest story on television. Was the Jackson story over covered? Perhaps, but as Time magazine founder Henry Luce has been credited with saying, "People make news, and dead people make more news, and dead superstars make even more news." The wall-to-wall coverage of Jackson's death hasn't always been the standard for celebrity deaths. As Emily Hedges of the Newseum points out, The CBS Evening News didn't report Elvis's death until six-and-a-half minutes into the evening newscast. Regardless of critics charging that television, in particular, over covered the Jackson story, there can be no doubt at all that the public was interested. The three prime-time specials that aired on CBS, NBC, and ABC the night Jackson died drew a total audience of 21.3 million viewers. That compares to 8.2 million viewers for a CSI: Miami rerun a week earlier, or 4.7 million people for a health-care special by President Barack Obama. Jackson's memorial service drew more than thirty-one million viewers spread across eighteen networks that carried the event live. In addition to the television viewership, MSNBC had nineteen million video streams fed by its Web site the day of the service, a record for the news site, and CNN had more than four million streams going out during the service. ABC News had close to six million streams, and FOXNews.com had more than three million Jackson's death will have a lasting impact on a number of levels. At its most obvious, Jackson's death was the loss of an amazing, if controversial, talent. Jackson's album Thriller and the groundbreaking videos that accompanied it changed the face of popular music. But the reports of his death were funneled to an online and mobile generation through channels that were not even thought about when Jackson's career began. In the week's following Jackson's death, TMZ continued to scoop the so-called mainstream media with accurate details about the police investigation of the cause of Jackson's death. Discussion questions The article details how quickly news of Jackson's death spread via new media distribution channels, as well as the changes in how it was covered by traditional media. How did you learn about Jackson's death? Was it from traditional media? New media? Did you follow the story as it developed? What media did you use to get updates and information? What about other major stories? How do you get your breaking news, and how do you follow up for more information? If you are too young to remember Jackson's death, what major news event do you first remember? How did you learn about it, and how did you follow up for more information?