It still takes 17 days for news to cross the Atlantic

On July 6, disgruntled United Airlines customer Dave Carroll posted his YouTube song about how United had broken his guitar. Within 48 hours it was in the mainstream American media (such as here on CNN) and was a hit on YouTube. Coverage and YouTube views grew rapidly on the following few days and was picked up by blogs (such as, err…, myself here, here and here).

In the world of cut-throat media competition to be first with the news, the internet making it easy for stories to travel round the world quickly, the US being a frequent (if anything, too frequent) source of stories for the British media and a media love of YouTube tales, this news therefore leapfrogged quickly into the British media, right?

Well, no.

In fact there was largely a collective pause for 17 days and it was not until Radio 4 covered the story yesterday morning, that we then had the burst of other mainstream media stories, such as Channel 4, ITN, Sky News* Guardian, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph all playing catch-up. Weirdly, several of the stories which have appeared are by-lined by journalists based in the US. But it wasn’t until the story ran on Radio 4 in the UK that their stories appeared.

Sometimes news still travels slowly.

* That’d be “First with the news, if you don’t count Mark Pack’s blog and others” 🙂