Early this morning, I happened to be watching an official webcam feed of morning meteorologist Kim Martucci at the local WUSA/9 station that first broke the Freddie Mac CFO suicide story.
WUSA news personnel reportedly learned about the suicide about 6:30 a.m. When it came time to air the breaking news near 7 a.m., the morning news anchor asked the question over and over again (presumably to the news director) if she was still supposed to run the preset story about news/reality show host Julie Chen's pregnancy. The answer was "yes."
So with only a few minutes left of airtime before "The Early Show," WUSA first ran a clip of Chen's day-old pregnancy announcement then broke the suicide story. On a side note, WUSA's hurried news graphic incorrectly identified the company as Fannie Mae.
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Nonetheless, WUSA did break the story first on television. The station also first alerted the cyberworld via a tweet from WUSA/9 digital correspondent Kristin Fisher.
After I looked up the Freddie Mac biographical information to clear up any lingering Freddy/Fannie confusion, I put a retweet of Fisher's posting up on my own DCAbloob Twitter feed and a then-bare bones post up on this blog itself. Others clearly had the similar thoughts in mind as retweets from WUSA's Fisher and Angie Goff spread rapidly across the Twitter universe.
At the time, I posted the need for some source other than WUSA to independently confirm this information. CBS News picked up the story after a half hour but only as derived from WUSA. In the meantime, WUSA posted the story on its own WUSA9.com site. The station also corrected the location from Reston to Vienna, Va.
It ended up taking more than a half hour before I could find another local news outlet (WTOP radio) to collaborate the story, a full hour before independent national news confirmation. For more than a little time, WUSA/9 and the Twitterverse stood alone.
______________________Labels: david kellermann, fairfax county, finance, freddie mac, journalism, northern virginia, suicide, twitter, vienna, virginia, wusa
