59 hours of continuing coverage + 10,000 and counting

Today, it’s exactly a week after the deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. More than 170 people died and hundreds were injured in a series of tragic events that caused outrage around the world and made headlines for several days.

It also introduced a lot of new people to Twitter as people provided live eyewitness accounts via the website but it also showed the strength and power of BNO News and its BreakingNewsOn Twitter service, again.

Last Wednesday, at 12.38 pm Eastern Time, BreakingNewsOn ran its first bulletin on the breaking story while quoting the British news channel Sky News who provided the first details seconds before.

Because of an extremely unlucky technical issue which happened in the hour before, BreakingNewsOn did not provide details sooner. India is among one of the international countries we have a close eye on and we monitor local media nearly 24/7.

Local media such as CNN-IBN had started covering the first reports 40 minutes before our Sky News sources bulletin. But at that time, the drama, panic and confusion was just starting to build up.

Other international media took several hours more to start covering the unfolding story from India. BNO News immediately provided continuing coverage as it became clear it was a major terrorist attack.

As the day went on, and as the news spread across the world, a record number of people joined BreakingNewsOn. On Wednesday (note that this is in the European timezone and includes about 6 hours of the initial coverage), a record number of 261 people joined.

As the events continued over the night and into its second day, BreakingNewsOn set its second record in as many days: 396 people joined, which is an all-time high according to our numbers.

On the third day, as the hostage crisis came to an end, 276 followed with 107 others joining during the aftermath on day 4.

BNO News provided continuing breaking news coverage over 59 hours. From minute one on Wednesday to the last second Friday night, without a single interruption.

BNO News brought you updates from local media, international media, news agencies and even BNO News sources in Mumbai. BNO News worked over the course of the events on a detailed casualty list which showed the number of dead, the injured and their nationalities for each local hospital. The list was updated several time.

BNO News also provided exclusive information from the Taj and Oberoi hotel management. Their staff shared up-to-the-minute details with our team about the situation inside the hotels and ruled out conflicting media reports.

BNO’s coverage on BreakingNewsOn also grabbed widespread attention among our current followers with hundreds of so-called “retweets” over the course of three days.

And it also shows how journalists are following the service. De Pers, a national newspaper in the Netherlands, showed live updates from BreakingNewsOn on its website during the first 6 hours of the Mumbai coverage. Also, De Tijd, a newspaper from Belgium, cited information directly from our Twitter coverage in their stories. The story also told its readers to follow BreakingNewsOn for the latest news from Mumbai.

And perhaps even better, during day 2 of the Mumbai coverage, we were able to welcome “@happyarts” as our 10,000th follower! A big milestone in the history of BreakingNewsOn as it continues to grow. The number of people joining BreakingNewsOn continues to soar with thousands of new members in the last two months. Welcome to all of you!

Overall, a very positive week for BNO News. Also, to everyone who donated over the recent days and weeks, thank you! Your support is extremely appreciated and our work for our new service (BNO News at www.bnonews.com) is already in process. However, we still need your support to continue doing this. Our team is putting so much time (and money) into this program, we still hope you will make a contribution at www.bnonews.com (you can donate by clicking on the banner). With your help, we can do this!

And for those interested, here is a graphic showing the daily amount of new people joining BreakingNewsOn on a daily base. The graphic shows the increase since 9/9 of this year and was last updated 1 hour ago as of this writing. What you can clearly see in the graphic is that the number of people who join on uneventful days, with little news, has continued to rise over the past few month.

Click to enlarge.

Now turning to another point. People who have followed BreakingNewsOn for a long time, at least from before the Mumbai terrorist attacks on Wednesday, have probably noticed the (breaking) news updates in “all-caps” saying “details soon”.

First, we have stopped doing it that way and have taken a new direction for these messages in all-caps. We are introducing three levels of “all-caps” alerts: “bulletin”, “urgent” and “flash”.

All-caps means breaking news which, to our our opinion, warrants an urgent update based on the preliminary information we have. The alert quickly sums up the breaking story with a text at the send saying either “(BULLETIN)”, “(URGENT)” or “(FLASH)”. I will explain what each level means shortly.

There are several reasons for this decision. First of all, it looks much more professional than what we have used until now. Also, readers can recognize the level of importance. We are also trying to bring back the number of “all caps” alerts we issue, to make them more unique.

The alert levels are pretty simple. A bulletin means its first word of (major) breaking news according to our (preliminary) information. And this is what a “BULLETIN” looks like:

An “urgent” update means its a significant update to a breaking, developing story (for example a high increase of a death toll). We haven’t “urgent” updates yet since we first introduced the bulletins, but we are starting to use them as of today. This is an “URGENT” example:

A “FLASH” would be a major breaking news update. An event that is either historic or something that happens only a few times a year at most. Think of a magnitude 8.5 earthquake, Barack Obama elected the first African American president or a terrorist attack in the United States. Events such as that would warrant a “FLASH” alert. To keep it simple: when you see a “FLASH” popping up from BreakingNewsOn, you know its a really big breaking news alert, something which will dominate the world headlines for days.

And final, this is a “FLASH” example:

Of course, all the alerts will be followed with a normal update within seconds to several minutes at most which provides additional details or some more background.

I hope you enjoyed reading this BNO News Blog update. Feel free to comment and we’ll read them and perhaps response to them as soon as possible.

You can also contact me by email at mpoppel@bnonews.com.

- Michael

P.S. You can now follow me on Twitter: @mpoppel.

BNO News beats New York 911 call

While it may look simple from the outside, behind those lines on our Twitter news service, there is a major newsgathering operation ongoing 24/7.

Of course, the newsgathering operation which we are currently setting up is mainly intended for our future online breaking news service at www.bnonews.com. However, it already gives us the opportunity to report breaking news on our Twitter service before anyone else can. Our newsgathering operations include monitoring literally thousands of local, national and international news outlets, contacting (emergency) officials, witnesses and monitoring official statements (press releases etc.) from all sorts of agencies (you sometimes see some of the press releases on a bnonews.com link which we post on Twitter).

Today, however, we had another great example to show the speed of our newsgathering, not only on important stories but also on local stories when emergency responders are still en-route to the accident.

Earlier today, we posted several updates on BreakingNewsOn regarding a bus crash in the Bronx, New York. It happened at the intersection of Conner Street and the New England Thruway.

As we received word from one of our sources, which said there had been a major bus crash involving two passenger busses carrying a total of around 100 people, we immediately went looking for official confirmation. Note that we only post breaking news updates from sources we consider reliable.

Our first call went to the nearest fire station, which was located near the site of the crash. We spoke with the person in charge at the fire station who told us they were not aware of any bus accident at that location, or at any other location for that matter. As the phone conversation continued and was about to end, sirens were heard in the background and the person at the other end of the line said they just received a call and were now going to respond to the double bus crash.

And although the initial reports indicated a major incident with many injuries, it turned out to be (much) less important. When we last checked, there were only 10 people with minor injuries. A colleague at a national news outlet informed us their sources said there were 9 injuries.

BNO News was working on this story even before emergency services were dispatched to the accident.

We, at BNO News, put a lot of work, time and money in both our forthcoming breaking news service as well as our Twitter news service (www.twitter.com/BreakingNewsOn) and we hope you will support us by contributing to us at www.bnonews.com (and click on the donation banner).

Also, looking back at election day, nearly 700 people subscribed to BreakingNewsOn and vote08 (www.twitter.com/vote08) to follow our in-depth coverage of the historic events that took place. And to give some more insight, our servers processed some 9,000 emails on election day, more than 4,000 visitors who followed our live election blog at bnonews.com and we were the first news source to provide Barack Obama’s victory speech (before he read it) and provided the first comments from US President Bush. And as our more people are turning to BreakingNewsOn, we are now approaching a total of 9,000 followers on Twitter, while we reached our 8,000th follower only two weeks ago.

Again, we hope you enjoy our services and hope you will contribute to help us continue our efforts, because we really need your help!

Thank you, and thank you for following us.