The timeline of Michael Jackson’s death, as reported in near real-time

Pop star Michael Jackson is dead. We know that because the media is reporting developments in the case by the minute. At 3:24 pm Pacific time today, the LA Times reported that Jackson was dead. The New York Times already has a minute-by-minute account of what happened, starting with a 12:21 pm PST call to the parademics. The NYT didn’t mention that TMZ was the first to report the hospitalization; then again, TMZ’s web site was down because of the traffic.
It will be interesting to see who gets the “by the second” scoop credit on being first with the story: the old media, or new media sources such as Twitter. On Twitter’s search function, Michael Jackson and “cardiac arrest” are among the top searches, as is Farrah Fawcett, who also died of cancer today. We’re leaving in a real-time world. This is proof.
It’s a sad day in celebrity news, but it’s also a kind of watershed that illustrates how much the media world has changed. If you recall the day that John F. Kennedy was shot, the AP and UPI photographer had to fight for the car phone as it happened. It took time for the news to filter out. Today, just about anybody who saw the celebrity being rushed to the hospital could have had the scoop. Just think of all of the lost productivity today.
Of course, the old media does have some advantages here. The current outage on Twitter must have something to do with the traffic related to Jackson’s death. TweetVolume, which measures the frequency of words appearing on Twitter, says that 66,000 Tweets mention the words “Michael Jackson.” But that number is no doubt low because of Twitter’s outage.   On Google Trends, Michael Jackson is already the subject of the No. 3 and No. 6-ranked searches of the moment. Cnet reported that news of Jackson’s death has roiled Michael Jackson’s page on Wikipedia, where competing editors are trying to get the first words in about the singer’s death.
I would suspect that the news is going to pass around the world very quickly. But be careful with the emails that you open. Virus writers are known to circulate malware with headlines related to the celebrity news of the moment. They are react just as quickly to the news as the media.