A brief history of breaking news

The Message and the Messenger

Here are a few different examples of the varying ways in which news has been broken over the past 250 years.

For the most part this is a visual/interactive list. It’s intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.

 

1. 1762: War between Britain and Spain (the news took seven months to reach the Philippines by ship)

“In 1762, when the Seven Years War widened into conflict between Britain and Spain, the enterprising British Admiralty sent a message to British forces in India to set off immediately to attack the Spanish colony in Manila in the Philippines. Arriving seven months after the original message had been sent from London, the British achieved the ultimate surprise attack, since word had still not arrived from Madrid that war had been declared at all. Their ship sailed under the Spanish defenders’ guns unchallenged before launching their successful assault.” –

(From William Hague’s biography of William Pitt the Younger (2004))

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2. February 1830 – The Oddingley Murders. Reports were spread across Britain by newspapers and also street-corner ballads in the month after the story broke.

Here are the first two verses of one:

The greatest of all miracles is going to unfold,
I’m going to unfold
Of two atrocious murder
As true as ever was told.

A horrible band of miscreants
A cruel plot did lay
‘Gainst Parker this Church Minister
To take his life away…

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3. 16 April 1912 – Reports of the Titanic’s Sinking (the news took around 30 hours to appear in the newspapers)

Here Stephen Bottomore explains the role that photographic images were beginning to play in breaking news events.

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Since mass-media became a major industry in the late 19th century, whenever there was a major news event, there was an accompanying scramble by journalists for all and any information about it.

When the Titanic went down the scramble became a positive melee, which reports and photographers hunting out any information that they could relate to the ship and its passengers.

This frenzy shook Bert Garai, later one of the great pressmen of the twentieth century who was starting out at the Havas news agency in Paris when the Titanic story broke. ‘It was most impressive and it gave me a glimpse of the speed, efficiency and enthusiasm such work entailed’, he later recalled.

Indeed in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic disaster, the press demonstrated just how quickly and pictorially it could cover a news story pictorially. Within a day or two of the sinking, newspapers and periodicals published artists’ impressions of the disaster, along with numerous photographs of the victims and other aspects of the story.

(From The Titanic and Silent Cinema by Steven Bottomore)

 

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4. 1 June 1953 – The conquest of Everest (the news arrived in London one day later)

There is a fascinating story behind James Morris’ (now Jan Morris) scoop for the Times. The news of Hilary and Tenzing’s successful summit attempt was broken by the newspaper, but only after the reporter had foolled other journalists who were trying to intercept his message> He used the following coded communication:

The full story is recounted in the Press Gazette

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5. 22 November 1963 – Assassination of President Kennedy (there was only a slight delay due to overloaded telephone exchanges between Dallas and the other parts of the US)

It is interested to see how these journalists received and delivered news back to their audience in the minutes following Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Jammed phones and unreliable testimony hampered their attempts to fish out the facts.

 

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6. 31 August 1997 – Death of Princess Diana (no delay)

By the time of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, what we have is a smoothed, colourful and evolved version of the JFK video. This and the 11 September attacks might have been the last enormous breaking stories to be covered – almost unopposed – by the traditional media.

 

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7. 7 July 2005 – The London Bombings (reported by “citizen” journalists on the spot)

July 2005 was a big milestone for bloggers and the Internet. All of a sudden breaking news was being reported differently – by people with personal experience. Accidental journalists.

To look at the role of the Internet in breaking news, there are two very good starting points. Paul Bradshaw and Mindy McAdams.

image credit: alfie

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8. 2 October 2009 – The Rio Olympics

The story was reported within seconds across all broadcast mediums – this is how I received the news via Twitter

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Top image from Flickr