Nick Berg - down the memory hole
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The good people of West Chester, Penn., Nick Berg's hometown, can't be fooled, saying that,
... his beheading by Islamists in Iraq has been underplayed by journalists, who are devoting more attention to the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal. ...
"I'm troubled by how the media and our politicians are focused on the [Abu Ghraib] prison," he said. "I don't think Mr. Berg and the four contractors executed in Fallujah [last month] are receiving a proper focus."
Not coincidentally, May 12 was a record setter across the blogosphere for readership. Blogs covering political and military affairs received their highest traffic counts since the Iraq campaign. <font size=3>
Only on April 8, 2003 has my site received more traffic than it did Wednesday. That was the day US Marines pulled down Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, Baghdad. I still-captured some shots of TV coverage and posted them. Best of the Web Today linked to the post; I recall that my blog got about 30,000 unique hits as the result.
Wednesday, I got more than 11,000 page views and more than 9,000 unique hits, almost thrice as many hits as usual.
So to all new readers, welcome, and thank you for reading!
Glenn Reynolds posted that he got 200,000 views Wednesday. Little Green Footballs reported more than 50,000 visitors before the day was near done.
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Unquestionably the reason was the story and video of Nick Berg being beheaded. LGF said that more than half its hits came from search pages with a variation of search terms including the name and "beheading," "video" and so forth. Lycos search engine reported that its top 10 search requests for the day all had "Nick Berg" in them.
For the first few hours Wednesday easily 95 percent of my referrals were from msn.com searches for the Berg murder. Andrew Sullivan reported,
Every political blog site has just seen an exponential jump in traffic - far more than anything that occurred during the Abu Ghraib unfolding. My traffic went through the roof yesterday, and, according to Alexa, so did everyone else's.
Other bloggers are already covering this phenom, so I won't try, except to note that for breaking news, the internet is fast becoming the medium of choice for information consumers. And within the internet, blogs are becoming the medium of choice for one and only one reason: we don't compete with each other as news media outlets and sites do.
Blogs do not do original reporting except very rarely and never (yet) for breaking news of national interest. For original reporting you have to turn to mainline media. And I am sure their sites got buried Wednesday, too. So why are blogs becoming sources of choice?
Because FoxNews.com won't link to CNN which won't link to the WaPo which won't link to MSNBC which won't link to the NYT, etc. Mainline news media remain vertical. But blogs are horizontal. Not only will we link to all those sites, we link to one another. In fact, we have to link that way because otherwise blogs vanish from internet consciousness.
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Another thing that led people to blogs Wednesday (and
still does) is that for mainline news media, the Nick Berg
atrocity practically disappeared down the memory hole
almost as fast as it appeared. As Jeff Jarvis wrote on his
blog,
We can look at the traffic on stories about an evil enemy
killing one of our innocents versus stories about -- to go
to Page One of the NY Times today: stories about
our "abuse" and even a story blaming us for the murder of
our innocent. ...
The people have their own newspaper now. And you're
looking at it [the blog].
Blogs are synergistic aggregators. No one blog is near as
comprehensive as any mainline media site (even mine,
haha). But because bloggers are dedicated linkers, as a
group we become extremely comprehensive in scope. And
nowhere does this shine through as when the mainline media
try to quash a story, as they pretty much tried to do with
the Berg story. |
