NetNative

Photo: Carel Pedre

Last night, a terrible tragedy struck the Caribbean island of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The earthquake that hit as night fell in the UK has devastated the already crumbling town of Port-au-Prince and the humanitarian aid currently on its way will be much needed.

As the quake struck, I went to work at Sky News, to prepare for its Sunrise programme at 6am. Usually I wouldn’t  write publicly about a work placement I am doing, but the efforts of Sky News last night were extraordinary and, more specifically, ‘academically’ interesting, so I hope they will forgive me. Last night, Sky News was the first international news platform to have pictures from on the ground and a live interview from Haiti – we were the first to know what was going on. Here’s why.

Unsurprisingly, the earthquake took out all the landline and mobile phone lines in Haiti immediately. This obviously disabled the country spectacularly – as well as the pressing issue of not being able to speak to each other, it meant that Haitians were not able to speak to the rest of the world. As a result, the classic ways of gathering information for a rolling news channel – call everyone we know and find out what’s happening- were redundant. We had a map, and that was it.

However, those with generators still had access to the internet (if they we willing to stay inside) and a few still had the web on their phones. At the beginning of the night, there was nothing coming in from the news agencies, who were having no better luck than us at finding out what was going on. So we turned to the crowd – what were people saying on the ground, right now?

Twitter proved invaluable. Amidst a lot of well-wishers, there were a few people tweeting from Haiti, giving us an instant update on what was happening. A few Twitpics started to appear – some fake- which then got bounced around the twittersphere within seconds. So we followed the source. Who’s pictures were they? That led us to Facebook, where a young radio journalist had uploaded 15 odd photos from the streets. Carel Pedre was offering his services to those abroad trying to find families, so was inundated with messages, so we started talking to him on Google chat instead. The Gmail account comes to the rescue! So suddenly we had an inside track – and permission to use photos.

#haiti Twitter search

The next step was to talk to Carel on the air – but there were no phone lines. So we turned to Skype. By this point we were talking to lots of people, constantly manning  the Twitter searches and Facebook post searches. Carel logged onto his Skype and five minutes later he was live on air – in good quality, no less- with our overnight presenter. We found out what was happening immediately around him and got a much fuller picture of the situation. As we spoke, there was an aftershock: Carel sat in a shaking building, transmitting all the while. Throughout the night, we spoke to Carel on Skype – and watched other news organisations do the same as it dawned on them that there was still a legitimate way to to talk to Haiti.

The next step was YouTube. A few searches and we had some footage of the dust rising immediately after the quake. And back to Facebook – who else was posting photos?

Together for Haiti Facebook group

And so it went on. Throughout the night, we spoke to people through whichever platform they had access to – Skype, Twitter, Facebook- and collated a sound idea of what was happening right now. The necessity of using the internet because the phones were down forced all traditional news gathering to the side, and meant we relied entirely on the web. Sky was first with the information because we turned to the people there and relied on them to tell the story – and for that they are owed huge thanks.

The earthquake was a tragedy of the greatest proportions and our hearts and minds are with those suffering. The quake has brought about the most horrifying scenes of destruction and poverty, and, even in a newsroom, we are all but helpless. I’m thankful, at least, that Sky is promoting the DEC appeal every time it mentions Haiti, with the hope that more people will donate.

Yet amidst the horror, last night was a triumph in web 2.0 journalism and communications; it proved that the internet allows us to share information across the globe, regardless of the scene.There is now no excuse for not being up-to-date, all of the time.

And I’ll never hear someone scoff at Twitter again.

For more updates, follow me on twitter – @epurser