Il Tirreno

On the night of the tragedy of Costa Concordia there is just a thread of information to follow to find some live news on the disaster that is taking place in the open sea in front of Giglio Island. And this thread, for the most part, leads to Twitter.  

The news of a cruise ship into trouble breaks in to the editorial office around 10.30 pm. But it is just around midnight that the facts start to assume the shape of  the tragedy. More than 4.000 people are trying to flee to safety, some of them panicked plunge into the water, the inhabitants of Giglio are already rescuing the victims, the captain seems to have abandoned the ship, and in the meantime the national media are silent. Just some “all-news” channels like the Bbc and the Cnn start to follow the news. The other media will realize what happened just when the light of the sun will show them the truth. And so, thought the night, Twitter becomes the main source of information. The tweets are pouring in: they come from who is sharing the news from the few media that are covering the disaster live, from who is on the place of the tragedy, and from who is trying to find some information about their loved ones.

Through Twitter, many people ask news to Il Tirreno: «Did someone die?», « Are there some missing persons?»,  «How did it happen?». To answer to all the questions it was not an easy job: the tragedy was still ongoing in the deep sea between phones with no signal, sources of information that contradict themselves, and news that are hard to verify. But the claim of information was too strong and it was impossible to do not keep on trying. Many people have been chasing us, spurring us and correcting us. And, most important, they have been helping us, telling the news they were finding on the web or the things that they were seeing with their eyes since they were right on Giglio Island.

It was a night full of concern and adrenalin, for us and for those who was looking for news everywhere and was finding the ours, complaining by the lack of information of the media. «The Italian journalism is sleeping». «Il Tirreno is the only newspaper that is following live the disaster». «It’s hard to find any news, you should be praised». «Il Tirreno is on Giglio Island». «On the web site of Il Tirreno all the information are live from the beginning». «This is what the web journalism is supposed to be». «You’re doing your duty».

Our duty, that night, consisted in providing on real time all the information reported by the correspondents in different languages through an online live broadcast on our website and on the social networks. And it is thanks to the social znetworks that we were able to contact the first witnesses. It is on Twitter and Facebook that, at last, started to appear the first pictures. In particular, among the first images that showed the Concordia slanted, there are the ones of a guy of Giglio Island: Giorgio Fanciulli. In few minutes, his photos posted on Facebook, are spread all over the internet. In the thousand of tweets, the editorial office tried to do not lose the thread of a journalism discourse providing their “own” information, but also confirming and confuting the news reported by others. Thanks to this work, performed during an emergency, when it was the time change all the pages of the newspaper with the news of the Concordia, the web office became the informative heart of the newspaper. An example, not isolated but exemplar, of the intern dynamics of a headline that is active on more than one platforms.