James Peeler’s phone blew up with messages as he drove home from church in Texas. Reading a book on her couch in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Wendy Schweiger spied something on Facebook. After finishing a night dive in the Baltic Sea near Finland, Matti Niiranen clicked into a live CNN broadcast.
Each knew that President Joe Biden had abandoned his bid for re-election minutes after he dropped a statement online without warning one summer Sunday.
Eight days after assassination attempt about former President Donald Trump, marked the second consecutive weekend in July that a seismic American story broke at a time when most people weren’t paying attention to the news. Biden’s announcement was a startling example of how quickly and far news spreads in today’s always-connected world.
“It seemed like a third of the nation knew about it instantly,” said Bill Wheatley, a longtime news executive, “and they told another third.”
Wheatley, now retired and spending the summer in Maine, sat down to check his email and absentmindedly refreshed CNN.com on his computer. If he hadn’t learned the news this way, text messages from friends would have alerted him soon after.
At 1:46 p.m. ET, the moment Biden posted your ad on X, about 215,000 people were connected to one of the top 124 news sites in the US. Fifteen minutes later, these sites had 893,000 readers, according to Chartbeat.
On apnews.com, 3,580 people entered the site at 1:46 pm. Nearly an hour later, at 2:43 p.m., the Associated Press online news site hit an afternoon peak with 18,936 new visitors. CNN.com and its news app saw usage quintuple within 20 minutes of the news breaking, the network said.
Television networks began regular programming of the story between 1:50 pm and 2:04 pm. During the relatively quiet quarter-hour before 2 p.m., a total of 2.69 million people watched CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC, the Nielsen company said. . Viewership on these three networks increased to 6.84 million between 2 and 4 p.m. Eastern Time. Add to that ABC and CBS, which also had special coverage at that time, and there were at least 9.27 million following the story on television.
How did everyone get there so quickly? As Wheatley suggested, word of mouth played a big role. To his credit, Peeler said he didn’t open his text messages until he stopped the car.
Many people also have alerts set up on their phones.
“Our phones are constantly ringing at us and we have them with us all the time,” said Brian Ott, professor of media and communications at Missouri State University and author of “The Twitter Presidency: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage.” .”
Ott and his wife were traveling to Belgrade, Serbia, and, with the time difference, went to bed Sunday night before Biden made his announcement. Ott found out the next morning when he checked online news sites and told his wife when she woke up.
“Oh, I already know,” she replied. She had logged into the X when she got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Since then, as he moved to Italy, visiting Rome and Florence, Ott said everyone he met who heard that he spoke English wanted to talk to him about Biden.
“My feeling is that the compulsion is the same for everyone,” he said. “In our digital world, information is capital and everyone wants to demonstrate their capital.”
At his summer home in Pyharanta, Finland, Niiranen showed a keen interest in U.S. politics, which the semi-retired writer said dates back to his time as an exchange student in Michigan. He had gone swimming after 10pm on Sunday, as daylight lasts longer there.
Niiranen read speculation that Biden might drop out, so when he sat on his deck after getting out of the water, he checked the CNN stream and discovered that was the case.
“Interesting election you have there!” he said. “I’ll be watching.”
Visiting family in Canaan, New Hampshire, Tracy Jasnowski was having a mostly disconnected week because of spotty Internet service. Once a day, adults and children withdrew with their devices to a spot on the lawn where the service was more consistent. That’s when she found out.
“Honestly, I thought I was going to throw up,” she said. “I was shocked. I was left adrift. I had no idea this was going to happen.”
Even though she hadn’t learned it at the time, Jasnowski said she quickly received text messages from friends. And when her father woke up from his nap, he turned on Fox News.
A generation or two earlier, people would have had to be watching television or listening to the radio to hear a special report on important news, said Wheatley, a former NBC News executive. Then people would spread it by telling friends or family. Now, with social media, text alerts and websites available at the click of a button, news moves “much, much faster.”
“The next logical question,” he said, “is how accurate is this?”
It’s a mantra instilled in young journalists: get the news quickly, but more importantly, get it right. A mistake on an important, last-minute story can derail a career. This month’s big stories illustrated the pressure that comes with the need for speed.
Almost immediately after Biden’s announcement, it became a major part of the story that journalists were telling that he had not supported his vice president, Kamala Harris, to succeed him. He did it in half an hour, but that’s an eternity for those who want to raise questions or launch conspiracy theories.
Likewise, the video of Trump’s rally, where shots were fired, instantly appeared on television screens. But most of the initial news was extremely cautious, maintaining what was known: Trump was removed from the stage by Secret Service agents. The blood was visible. There was a noise that sounded like gunshots.
This, in turn, led some to criticize journalists for being very cautious and reluctant to call it an assassination attempt. However, not all facts are known quickly; almost two weeks later, in Congressional hearingFBI Director Christopher Wray said it is still not entirely clear whether Trump was hit by a bullet or shrapnel. The next day, the F.B.I. announced concluded it was a bullet.
In other words, there is often more to a story than meets the eye, and the frenzy of breaking news demands a strong adherence to the facts available at the time, no matter what becomes clear later.
When Peeler arrived at his destination in Texas last week and checked what his friends had texted him about Biden, he accessed the websites of local TV network affiliates. In Pennsylvania, Schweiger immediately turned to the AP and The New York Times online.
They were both grateful to have a place they considered reliable to get the facts.
“I operate under the assumption that news lasts 24 hours and that you always have people who can be asked for anything at any time,” Schweiger said.
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.
