Reinventing the @NewsCycle #Eugene

6 Apr 2010

The murder of South African white supremacist Eugene Terre'Blanche early on Saturday evening, 3 April 2010, is arguably one of the biggest news events in South Africa this year, and once again, traditional news outlets were beaten to the punch by Twitter and the blogosphere.

Terre'Blanche was allegedly slain by two of his farm employees following a wage dispute the preceding afternoon. His death comes in the wake of litigation against ANCYL President Julius Malema by Afrikaner lobbying groups aiming to ban him from singing an apartheid struggle song with the lyrics “shoot the boer/shoot shoot”.

@NicDawes (editor-in-chief of the Mail & Guardian) was one of the first to break the news of Terre'Blanche's murder before it had appeared in any major news outlet on the globe [Talk Radio 702's Aki Anastasiou tweeted 10 minutes before at 10.22pm with a link to the fromtheold blog post, preceded by a leader tweet at 10.21pm - managing ed]. What was surprising was how international news outlets anticipated being beaten to the post by Twitter and the blogosphere, and leveraged it for their gain.

Continue reading the full article on www.memeburn.com.

Updated 6 April 2010 at 6.02pm

Source: Memeburn

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