When News Breaks...

This past Sunday, October 26th, the tragic news broke that South African national Soccer Team Captain, Senzo Meyiwa had been murdered.

Be it a Sunday evening, SA's three news channel were greatly understaffed and worked a somewhat limited schedule compared to the rest of the week.

So, when ANN7 was the first news channel to break the news in the 11pm edition of Nightcap (with eNCA a few seconds later), there was very little information available about the story and what did the news channels do about it? Nothing.

All channels went on with their schedule as if it were just a normal story: eNCA and ANN7 both went to taped content at 23:30, with SABC News having signed off hours eariler as they usually do.

Supersport Blitz, the local sports news channel packaged by Supersport did not mention the story at all for the remainder of Sunday evening. Yes, during the 11pm hour (when the news broke) the channel was carrying Sky Sports News, but they could have broken out of that broadcast to mention the tragic news or just put up a ticker message on screen.

What I am getting at is that if you not someone to go online late on a Sunday night, you would not have known the news. The online world was abuzz with the tragic news, with various relevant terms trending on social networks throughout the evening and various news websites having the decency to publish an article about what information is known up until that point.

And South Africa's three news channels (and also SS Blitz as this is a story relevant to them as well)? Closed on time for Sunday office hours.

This is the first time that I can recall that a South African news story broke and developed in the online world much faster and better than the traditional broadcast news medium of television with Twitter providing much more information than what is present on television.

Yes, it is now common place for Twitter to now be the center of the news world in countries like the US, but up to this point it has been pretty common for South African news to break on television first.

Of course, come Monday morning the news channels all saw the potential for this story to be milked for their gain and they all jumped on the bandwagon with some being insensitive enough to be close to stalking family and friends of the victim, people that are in mourning. 

Is this a kind of changing of the guard between new and old media beginning to take place right here in Africa?