June 26th, 2009
Michael Jackson’s death will be remembered for many reasons. They include the fact that at 50 he died “too young” and it came as a shock (compared to the passing of former Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett who aslo passed away Thursday after battling cancer).
However, an important sidenote to the passing of the “Thriller,” “Beat It” and “Bad” singer is the coming of age of the online media. TMZ.com, often written off as a gossip site, broke the news of the former Jackson 5 frontman’s hospitalization and death first. After that, the word spread like wildfire with posts on Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging. At its peak, Twitter said up to 5,000 Jackson messages were posted every minute. Web query tracking service Google Trends said the search for “Michael Jackson died” was “on fire.”
“Today was a seminal moment in Internet history,” read a statement from AOL, whic co-owns TMZ.com with Telepictures Productions. “We’ve never seen anything like this in terms of scope or depth.”
Now, after the initial news, social networking, gossip blogs and other sites are ablaze with rumours surrounding his death. How do you deal with these rumours if you are a parent? You used to be able to say that non-mainstream media websites are not creditable, however that is no longer accurate as TMZ.com led the way with one of the top news stories of the year so far.
Robin