Bloody Sunday

“Scores dead as fire sweeps through nightclub in Brazil”, was the headline of  The New York Times´ international section in its webpage this afternoon. The story talks about the big tragedy that has caught the world´s attention this Sunday.  “A fire ignited by a live band’s pyrotechnic spectacle swept through a nightclub filled with university students early Sunday morning in Santa Maria, a city in southern Brazil, leaving at least 245 people dead, police officials said”, explained the newspaper.

However, nothing in this sad headline was new for me. At 10:30 in the morning - in the Spanish time zone, and 7h30 in the Brazilian time zone – I saw for the first time something about what was happening in my country. A journalist friend of mine wrote in Facebook: “Dilma (Brazil´s president) is leaving the meeting in Chile and going to Santa Maria”. At the first moment, I haven´t realized the relevance of that comment. After some minutes, I red again something about Santa Maria in Twitter. Again, I didn’t pay really attention to it. As soon as I have many journalist friends, I thought it was something about our president´s schedule. But, I got intrigued. So, I took a look in the El Pais website and I saw the news. It was everywhere. Everywhere.

The horrible tragedy that turned many Brazilians and world citizens´day into a sad Sunday (I just can´t stop thinking about the pain those families must be feeling) also made me analyze the way I got into the information. 

My first contact with the news came from social networks. Probably many people have had the same experience I had: social media is definitely a place in which people are interacting all the time, even on a Sunday morning. I have entered in the Facebook not with the intention to see any news, but to see what my friends did on the Saturday night. The breaking news achieved me indirectly. It was impossible not to see (and unconsciously I have tried!), they were everywhere.

On the other hand, in order to better understand the fact, have real numbers (I saw tens of different numbers of deaths in Twitter) and a real time tracking of the tragedy consequences, I went for traditional media. I expected to have better quality of information. 

But, it was visible that most of traditional media around the world was telling me the same story, with the same sad numbers and the same hurt testimonies. It means they were finding support in the same Brazilian media and news agencies correspondents that were in the country on that moment. I didn´t get disapointed about it. It simply like this: basic information are commoditized.  Everybody knows it. How could they differentiate themselves? By the traditional path: being the first to release new information about the fact, being the first to have a new interesting testimonial, a new point of view from the happening, a new source analyzing the information... and some traditional media did this role well.  

Therefore, although information blink and some free opinions are usually gotten nowadays from social media, the audience still relies on traditional media to have (most of the times) complete, accurate and trustful coverage of it. It is clear that commoditized breaking news now belong to social networks, but it is also noticeable that social media offer a complementary service for the audience, who is going to – at the end – rely on a media company.

This new reality shows that traditional media is losing a role: scoops can now come from normal citizens from anywhere. On the other hand, it is also gaining the opportunity to differentiate itself, assuming a stronger role of following, questioning, tracking, analyzing the news that already happened.