Here’s the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week’s edition, I look at the way Michael Jackson’s death yesterday played out online, going from TMZ to Twitter to the LA Times blog. Yesterday was a record traffic day for Yahoo, and Google News reacted like it was under a hack attack from the huge jump in search queries for Michael Jackson. Also, the Guardian is doing a massive crowdsourcing project to look over hundreds of thousands of documents of expenses from members of parliament.
Check it out:
Background music is “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson.
Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:
Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson at Official Google blog
Losing Michael Jackson at Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog
Michael Jackson Dies: Twitter Tributes Now 30% of Tweets at Mashable
Guardian Crowdsources Information about Parliament Members’ Expenses at Poynter
Investigate your MP’s expenses at the Guardian
MPs expenses — what you’ve told us. So far at the Guardian
Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment at Nieman Journalism Lab
King of Twitter by Jeff Jarvis
Here’s a graphical view of last week’s MediaShift survey results. The question was “What websites do you trust most for news about Iran?”
Also, be sure to vote in our poll about when you really believed Michael Jackson died.
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.
Michael Jackson was killed by Iranian agents at the behest of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in order to divert attention from his oppression of the Iranian people. It worked. There is not a major news network in the country that is talking about Iran, they are spending their time on Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and comparisons to Elvis. Meanwhile Iranians die, and they get no TV specials.