The fall of the twin towers - and old media

Mon, 03/23/2009 1:23 PM | Sci-Tech

I don't wish to belittle the tragedy that was 9/11 but it shaped this decade, not only in political terms, but also in something else.

Where we looked for information. Cast your mind back to that day. Where were you?

I was walking with my mother through the English countryside when I heard about it via SMS from a friend back in Indonesia.

By the time I got home and dialed into the Net none of the main news websites was accessible.

Everyone was trying to do what I was doing, and that jammed all the big news websites: CNN.com, MSNBC.com, Time.com and NYTtimes.com. At 8:49 a.m. East Coast time, three minutes after the first plane hit, both CNN's and MSNBC's servers collapsed.

It was the news website's big day in the sun, and they failed. In those days there were very few other ways of finding out time-sensitive information. So like everyone else we huddled around the television and gawped in disbelief.

This didn't stop people searching. And of course most of them went to Google. So much so Google ended up caching - saving copies of - news websites where they could.

But, somehow, 9/11 caused something of a sea change in the way that people looked for information.

An event of such proportions fed an appetite that TV and mainstream media could not satisfy, sending people online to use search engines to look for more information.

They looked for things like twin towers, bin laden, nostradamus, and they found them on sites that weren't by any stretch of the imagination news sites.

In the wake of 9/11, therefore, something rather odd happened.

Traffic to the big websites dropped off back to their pre-9/11 levels. CNN fell 27 percent, MSNBC 45 percent, New York Times 23 percent. But traffic to Google rose in the same period, by 12 percent.

Over the next few years traffic to Google - which, remember, was just a search engine - climbed until, in 2006, it had more or less caught up with the content giants Microsoft and Yahoo.

Google had been smart. On the day of 9/11 it figured out something important: That searching didn't have to be just - was no longer - about searching for old, historical stuff.

It wasn't just about looking for things that had happened. It was also about things that were happening. In other words, the distinction between news and everything else had blurred.

As the twin towers fell, we needed to know everything we could about this new threat.

Within a day of 9/11, Google had included a news link on its front page - the beginning of its Google News site which has now, for many, replaced the visit to CNN or New York Times.

Google was, in effect, saying: Find your news here.

The impact was clear. By 2004 Internet users were quite used to going to non-news sites to see material not covered by the mainstream media.

The Pew Internet Survey found that 24% of users in the US said "they have searched on the Internet for news stories, photographs or videos that other media outlets have decided not to publish or broadcast."

The era of mainstream media monopolizing current information was gone, because people had the means and know-how to find it elsewhere. Blogs blossomed, giving everyone a voice - not only for commentary, but also for muckraking and quality reporting.

In 1999 a Google crawler - little slices of code that wander around the Internet checking to see whether web pages have been updated - would take a month to detect a change to a web page. Now, 10 years on, it takes a few minutes.

All information is new, and all information is, potentially, news.

This is probably the biggest threat to traditional media, and yet, for the most part, it's gone unnoticed.

I've talked in this column previously about how Twitter - the link-sharing, status-sharing service - has challenged traditional ideas of media.

We're now just as likely to trust a well-informed acquaintance to keep us informed about developments in the world as we are a major news site.

On my Twitter feed I have both BBC news and the eccentric musings of Stephen Fry, the comedian. Twitter gives them equal weight.

But that change wouldn't have happened if this earlier sea change had not occurred: that we as users would not slavishly visit a mainstream news site to find out what was happening.

The downfall of big media would probably have happened anyway. But 9/11 pushed ordinary folk into looking elsewhere.

And once we'd done it, there was no turning back.

(c) 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd

This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com