Digital Media and Reporting Conflict by Daniel Bennett

Author:Daniel Bennett [Bennett, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138243262
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Part IV

7 ‘Live Blogging’ Terror

The BBC’s Coverage of the Attacks on Mumbai

Between the 26 and 28 November 2008, the Indian city of Mumbai was the victim of a coordinated terror attack. Ten men aiming to disrupt political reconciliation between India and Pakistan began a campaign of killing which included Indian citizens at Mumbai’s main railway station, Indian and foreign guests at two of the city’s iconic hotels and Jews at the headquarters of an orthodox Jewish organisation. The attack, which continued for more than 60 hours while Indian security forces undertook room by room clearances of the occupied buildings, left 174 dead and hundreds wounded.1 India had witnessed more deadly attacks at the hands of militants in the past. In 1993, 257 people had died in 13 bomb blasts across the city and in 2006, 209 people had been killed after seven bombs exploded on a Mumbai train.2 The attacks in 2008, however, were dubbed ‘India’s 9/11’—it was recognition that this event had similarly ‘mesmerised the world’s media’.3

So far this book has considered how BBC journalists use blogs as sources of information to inform their journalism and how they responded to the blogging challenge by writing their own blogs, both in the form of reporters’ blogs and programme blogs. The final two chapters focus on the consequences of these developments for BBC content. In the first of two case studies, this chapter explores how BBC journalists used a ‘live blog’ format during the Mumbai attacks as a reporting tool to quickly convey breaking news to an online audience. The chapter explores the extent to which a digitally connected audience contributed to the BBC’s online coverage of a major terror attack and whether the live blogging format is facilitating an increase in the representation of nonofficial sources in the news.

The BBC’s ‘live blog’ or live text updates of the Mumbai attacks proved popular both with audiences and industry analysts. The coverage of the Mumbai attacks drew the third-highest number of unique users to the BBC News website in a single day in 2008.4 On Thursday 27 November the website registered 6.8 million unique users. On both 27 and 28 November the single-most-read webpage on the BBC website was the respective Mumbai live update page.5 In 2009, the BBC’s online coverage received the internet award from the Online News Association for breaking news. The judges described the BBC’s ‘breaking news blog’ as a ‘one-stop shop’ with a lot of ‘primary source information’ and praised the live blog ‘for being comprehensive, up-to-date and for the way it incorporated social media’.6

The Mumbai live pages sparked debate, both internally and externally, about the integration of blogs and particularly Twitter updates into the BBC’s coverage of a major news event. Writing in The Independent, Tom Sutcliffe argued that the BBC’s live updates were ‘the apotheosis of citizen journalism, with Mumbai bystanders shoulder to shoulder with BBC staff in bringing the latest news to a world audience’.7 He described this approach as a ‘worrying development’ and urged the BBC not to blur ‘the boundary between twittering and serious reporting’.

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