Within minutes of the first shootings this morning on the Virginia Tech campus, students began posting near-live updates of the events through blogs, photos and even video. Even with the number of students killed still uncertain, the documentation of the event was so rich that readers could glean a near perfect re-enactment of the morning. [...]

Within minutes of the first shootings this morning on the Virginia Tech campus, students began posting near-live updates of the events through blogs, photos and even video. Even with the number of students killed still uncertain, the documentation of the event was so rich that readers could glean a near perfect re-enactment of the morning. In addition to personal accounts posted in students’ LiveJournal pages and in the comments field of blogs, photos have been posted to Flickr, a Wikipedia entry has a collaborative updating timeline, nearly 160 tribute groups have been formed on Facebook, and a student-made video hosted on CNN has been viewed over 1 million times.

I’m blown away by the role that social media sites – most notably Live Journal and Facebook – have played in the development of this major news story. Here’s an excerpt from one student’s entry,

“The story goes that she was in class and they heard a banging, her teacher opened the door to find out what was going on, and after not seeing anything, closed the door. Not more than two seconds later, a gunman entered her room, to which the class responded by getting underneath the desks and basicly hiding as well as possible from this guy. He then shot at the class somewhere between 8 to 12 times and then left.”

And from the comments left by another,

“Apparently one of my friends was shot in the leg at WAJ, the dorm shooting this morning. I have heard he was shot in the leg, he’s an RA there. I have heard there was one female shot and killed in WAJ and a male RA injured on the news. Unconfirmed, I have heard that at triage there were more than 30 “black tags” at triage. That means body bags. I hope that’s not true…I have two friends in Derring Hall, near Norris, and one in Slusher, closer to West AJ. Students have been scared and flourished. No one is allowed to leave or come onto campus. Students have come on the news saying they have jumped out of windows in Norris and seen a man come out of the building covered in blood.”

Students are using Facebook as a way to share information about students hit, the delayed response of campus officials, misinformation reported by FOX news, and the identity of the shooter. As such, social media sites have become a visible first source of information for journalists. You can see journalists from CBC, NPR, NBC, and more reaching out to students in the comments fields of posts and in facebook forums.

Just as the major news sources are using social media to stay updated on a rapidly developing story, they’re using search to broadcast that information back to the public. Here’s a New York Times paid search ad for “student shooting”:

In stark contrast, the contextual ads shown against this story are almost completely irrelevant, if not inappropriate – further proof that contextual ad networks need human editors (or at the very least, a way for advertisers to safeguard against poor placement). Here are just a few examples (note text in the first display ad on the right!!):

(Larger screen shot of the left-hand text ads)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Media Convergence, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.