How modern media spread death news

A soldier in Afghanistan learned about the death of Osama bin Laden on Facebook. A TV producer got a tip from comedian Kathy Griffin on Twitter.

A blues musician received an email alert from The New York Times. And a woman found out as she scrolled through the internet on her smartphone while walking her dog.

In an illustration of how the information world has changed, many people learned through media formats or devices which were not available a decade ago that the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks had been killed.

“It just kind of spread like wildfire online,” said Stephen Vujevich, a student at Immaculata University in Pennsylvania. “It’s amazing to see how social media played a part in it.”

A soldier who identified himself only as Carlos from Queens called New York sports radio station WFAN to note that he and his buddies in Afghanistan learned the news not from commanding officers, but from Facebook.

Angie Scharnhorst of Kansas had an early-morning flight and, if she had not been carrying her smartphone while walking her dog at 2 a.m., she said she probably would not have heard the news until later in the day.

Ashlee Edwards, a content producer for the CBS affiliate WBTW-TV in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was watching The Tudors with a friend when she saw Griffin’s tweet urging her to “turn on CNN now” because the president was about to make an announcement.

Abroad, the media of choice were much the same. Perhaps most prominently, one Twitter user told the story before the world knew what was happening - he lives near the compound in Pakistan where bin Laden was killed and became, in his words, “the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it”.

Sohaib Athar, 33, is a computer programmer who was startled by a helicopter clattering in the early hours of Monday. He tweeted about it, and soon the sole helicopter multiplied into several and gunfire and explosions rocked the air above the town.

Mr Athar’s tweets quickly garnered tens of thousands of followers as he apparently became the first in the world to describe the US operation to kill one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.

Elsewhere, Briton Shari Mai, of west London, said through Facebook that she heard the news via the Financial Times. Marina Ch of Moscow learned it through Facebook and The Associated Press. Monique Taylor, an Australian, said she was in London and the story was all over Facebook.

In Washington, it was before 10 p.m. on Sunday that many Washington-based reporters were told to get to work because the president was to speak. They were not told why.

At 10.25, Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tweeted: “So I’m told by a reputable person that they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.” Mainstream news organisations began reporting that bin Laden was dead about 15 or 20 minutes later. Some, such as CNN and NBC, were tentative at first. Others, including ABC, were more definitive. Fox News Channel was joyful. The speed of social media struck some as an epochal moment in news coverage. “If anyone isn’t a believer in Twitter as an amazingly powerful news vehicle, last night should convert you,” tweeted Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post’s political website The Fix.