Did a lone BBC executive beat the nationals to a major national story? Blogger Steve Yelvington says that he first learned of last Thursday’s remarkable Heathrow crash from the blog of Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s director of global news.
Sambrook, (who happened to be in the airport lounge at the time, which helps) took a picture and uploaded it to his blog. Guardian Unlimited was, Yelvington says, “a bit slow out of the gate”, bbc.co.uk was “quite on top of things” and Times Online was “somewhere in the middle”.
Interestingly, telegraph.co.uk editor Marcus Warren pops up in the comments on Yelvington’s blog to say that his team in fact had the news before any of the above sites. He carried out “an audit” of all them on the day to be sure.
31-01-08 UPDATE
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As Yelvington helpfully points out in the comments below, his point was not who got the story first but how out news consumpsion has changed.
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