Behind The Ball

And social media, in several different ways, is making a major contribution to the changes.

Expert journalists often aren’t journalists

The reality of the media landscape in 2014 is that journalists with specialist knowledge are few and far between, and very rarely work fulltime in the general media. This is especially true in aviation – look only at CNN’s temporary rehiring of pilot and aviation expert Miles O’Brien to contribute to its nonstop, 24-hour coverage of the MH370 disappearance. O’Brien had previously been the linchpin of the network’s aerospace reporting until CNN let him go in 2008, and his role was filled by little more than industry financial analysts and assorted talking heads waving 1:200 scale aircraft models around while making whooshing noises.

It’s easy to understand the contempt with which aviation professionals, enthusiasts andfrequent flyers view much of the general media’s coverage of aviation. It’s the general media’s own fault: sensationalist headline-grabbing clickbait in the age of BuzzFeed turns an unusual situation like a loss of cabin pressure or moderate turbulence into an aircraft-plummetting, terrified-passengers, life-flashed-before-our-eyes nonsense of breathless non-story reporting.

If the general media wants to be taken seriously, it needs to address the root causes of clangers like “Bowing 777” chyrons, and provide more insight than “Developing story: Boeing 777 will struggle to maintain altitude once the fuel tanks are empty”.

Photo editors without industry knowledge don’t help their media outlet’s reputation by showing an A380 on a story about a Qantas 737, or using decade-old images of Virgin Blue aircraft on a story about Virgin Australia. Publications that would never mix up their Minogues have only themselves to blame if they relegate themselves to irrelevance. Experts avoid them, trying not to become the latest mischaracterised soundbite, and the intelligent discussion moves elsewhere.

Social media means instant publishing for anyone

New media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, YouTube, Flickr and others make publishing effortless and instantaneous, enabling knowledgeable people to break and develop news stories. In some ways, it’s easier for experts who aren’t tied to a newsroom. Many media outlets have “don’t scoop the story” policies that mean the first people discussing breaking news are likely not to be fulltime journalists – at least not those working for traditional publications.

Experts might be alerted bymonitoring tools that flag potential incidents like aircraft squawking 7700, by networks and contacts, or by their own use of real-time social media.

The impetus for news may also arrive from non-experts. Images of aircraft evacuations following relatively minor emergencies appear online regularly. Blurry cameraphone images or video and the “emergency evacuation selfie” from the tarmac have become, quite organically, a part of how we learn that an aircraft has diverted. And in many ways these amateur pictures with widely available consumer equipment are also becoming the zeitgeist image of the incident – more so than the historic ominous “delayed/cancelled” line on an arrivals board at the destination airport.

(That’s not to say that the arrivals board has lost its impact on the story: ET702 was, in a moment of Swiss efficiency that translated into Twitter levity, listed as “arrived” on the boards at Geneva after it was hijacked. ) Republishing is also a hallmark of the social media era. Retweeting on Twitter is the clearest example, but cross-platform republishing is also significant. Twitter and Facebook – in many ways the two core technologies – both include inline previews of links to numerous other websites, enabling rich media like photos and videos to appear in users’ news streams.

And it all coalesces into a hashtag.

Hashtags enable conversations

One of the benefits of social media in a crisis is that it is instant. New Zealanders are used to checking Twitter’s #eqnz hashtag when they drop, cover and hold for absolutely instantaneous updates on what’s going on, and it’s the same around the world during significantaviation news as well.

In commercial aviation, hashtags quickly form around flight numbers. The two-character IATA code plus the one-to-four digit flight number makes an excellent short, unique string of characters for a hashtag – #ET702, #QF32, #MH370 – and the conversation begins.

(Hashtags begin with a # symbol and are widely used to group together tweets, images and videos on a subject, allowing for information discovery and conversations among otherwise unconnected users. ) But following a popular hashtag during a major event is the online equivalent of trying to drink from a firehose. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s relatively simple to find the sources who are providing clear, useful information, and who are being retweeted by other sources you already trust. If what’s being said is important, it will rise to the top of the heap.

Social media self-filters information

Once a community of contributors has gathered around a breaking news hashtag, social media’s useful filtering role comes into play. Knowledgeable sources around the world republish useful information, correct what’s wrong, and add brief commentary using RT (retweet) or MT (modified tweet) prefixes.

It’s no longer just “our correspondent in…” who can make a useful contribution – it’s someone with knowledge in Sydney or Santiago, Seattle or Sheffield, Stuttgart or Shenzhen.

Airlines, airports, safety regulators, national agencies and other authoritative sources become just one more voice in the crowd – although a voice that is often amplified by media and Twitter users retweeting and favoriting their tweets, and by appearancein the ‘top tweets’ section of a hashtag search.

The US National Transportation Safety Board is an agency at the forefront of this trend. It releases factual information and images on Twitter and Flickr swiftly. Within an hour of investigators reaching the scene of Asiana Airlines flight 214 in San Francisco on July 6 2013, the NTSB had published its first tweets with images of investigators examining the aircraft, and continued to do so throughout the on-site portion of the investigation.

News conferences with NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman, who quickly became the calm, knowledgeable, professional face of the incident, were broadcast online and swiftly posted to YouTube.

In some ways, experts using social media are like journalists: they want to see the original source and draw their own conclusions, rather than having a media outlet draw the conclusions for them.

Making source material available enables them to do so.

On social media, curation occurs quickly too. Well-regarded sources can sum up what’s going on.

Services like Storify (which allow users to embed tweets, images and text into a static page) help people to get up to speed quickly. The larger aviation blogs and new media sites like AirlineReporter and Jaunted assemble the first outlines of their stories.

And it’s from there that the focus will often shift from breaking the news to developing the story – at which point it’s a matter of finding the stories that are accurate and informative rather than sensationalist and incorrect.

Detail and in-depth information is available online

The rebirth of longform online journalism over the last couple of years is an incredibly positive trend. Detailed, expert commentary and analysis is now available to read and dissect.

Readers worldwide can subscribe to outlets like Australian Aviation Online, and laser-focused specialist media sites are growing exponentially, increasing the appetite for informative, detailed stories written for an informed, detail-hungry audience.

Look at the success of the Runway Girl Network, an independent passenger experience-focused news service based in the US but with journalists worldwide; The Design Air, a UK site concentrating on design, branding and livery; or Inflight Feed, a Germany-based site focusing on inflight food with a specialty in buy-on-board options.

Meanwhile, independent publishing sites like Medium enable longform journalism to bepublished quickly and easily. On the other hand, blogging platforms like Tumblr and WordPress mean that independent theories (of varying degrees of separation from reality) about what happened to MH370 become real news for a day or so before being debunked by experts.

Social media’s filtering behaviour rewards the useful, but doesn’t really punish error

The self-filtering that social media drives means that valuable writing and broadcasting from disparate sources is discovered, recognised and recommended.

In one of the more codifiedexamples of curation, Danish aviation journalist Marisa Garcia manages an informative page covering aircraft interiors, airline branding and aviation technical standards on social media republishing site Rebelmouse.

The dross is ridiculed, immortalised and retweeted – but not in the same way, and not to the same timeframe. There’s no immediate penalty for getting facts wrong or drawing false conclusions. It’s possible for anyone to pretend to have information, which is one reason why showing the information’s source is important. Social media does self-correct, but later on in the story cycle.

But the most egregious mistakes are immortalised. CNN’s coverage of MH370 will be remembered for its over-hyped professional ignorance more than for the few genuinely informative segments where it has hosted discussions and panels of actual aviation journalists, experts and analysts.

And readers have a choice of where to get their news these days. No longer are people reliant on their local, regional and national press to catch up with what’s going on. It’s possible to read the information you want from London, New York, Mumbai, Singapore or Taipei faster than a 24‑hour news channel returns to the story from an advertising break. From there, in-depth analysis is a few clicks away using Google and Twitter.

Readers who are knowledgeable about a subject matter know the shibboleths to look out for that suggest whether a particular journalist, outlet or story is accurate and worth their time. Getting obvious details wrong is a key flag here.

When even The New York Times publishes a story referring to the ET702 Boeing 767-300ER as aBoeing 737-600 – an aircraft that Ethiopian has never operated and which, with only 69 ever produced, would make any knowledgeable aviation journalist look twice – it’s easy to see why knowledgeable readers despair of the general media’s aviation coverage.

Reader confidence is moving from outlet to journalist

The decline of general media accuracy and expertise has driven a quiet yet tectonic shift of confidence from masthead to byline. In many cases, knowledgeable readers trust the information from individual journalists and reporters, sometimes more than they trust the spectrum of the information coming from the news outlets where those journalists report.

Those individual journalists are often active on social media (primarily on Twitter) with thousands or even tens of thousands of readers following their Twitter accounts for shortform breaking news, longform articles, curated retweets, and recommendations of other sources.

Added together, the following of just a handful of these social media accounts exceeds the weekly circulation of some larger Australian newspapers. The utility of social media, at the end of the day, is that collating these disparate sources into an easy-to-follow timeline of stories is simple – and accessible online, anywhere, 24/7.

ET702: the first livetweeted hijacking

The hijacking of Ethiopian Airlines flight 702 was an unusual event even by news standards. For a start, the timing meant that much of the Western world’s media was asleep. The aircraft squawked 7700 briefly shortly after crossing the border into Sudan, but only overflew its destination, Rome, in the early hoursof a Monday morning in Europe, late on a Sunday evening in the US.

And that’s where it was picked up – continuing up the Adriatic towards central Europe – by independent journalists on Twitter.

Publicly available ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) information on flight tracking websites like Flightradar24 and Planefinder allows anyone with a computer or mobile device to track any aircraft equipped with the technology, essentially live. The websites provide a wealth of information, including altitude, speed, heading, squawk code, registration and aircraft type. Finding a flight is a simple matter of typing in a flight number or registration.

Listening live to cockpit-ground communications is also a matter of a few clicks. LiveATC has decent coverage of North American, European and Australian airports, with reasonable South American coverage and some key Asian frequencies as well.

Familiarity with the region helps, but with a wealth of mapping websites available – many of which include satellite imagery – it’s possible to brush up on the terrain, destination and likely diversion airports.

Approach plates are online too, enabling observers to calculate whether an aircraft’s heading, speed and altitude match the top of an ILS glideslope or visual approach. In the case of ET702, the aircraft was in an unconventional holding pattern over the southwest tip of Lac Léman and Geneva, and had to sweep south in order to pick up the ILS.

Armed with information about where the aircraft is, where it’s going and what it’s saying, it’s a simple matter for anyone with even a basic understanding of how commercial aviation works – and most Australian Aviation readerswould fall into that category – to contribute productively to the conversation.

MH370: aircraft can still disappear in 2014

The most confounding part of the deeply oversensationalised MH370 story is that an airliner can still disappear. The news media abhors a vacuum even more than nature does, and fills it with speculation, guesswork and, very occasionally, expert opinion.

With MH370’s disappearance seemingly untrackable by military or civilian radar (let alone public channels like ADS-B), the aircraft was out of contact for a surprising six hours between its last ATC contact and when Malaysia Airlines announced it was missing.

As a result, social media was significantly less of a driver of the story than in the case of ET702 – a fact which only increased as the disappearance developed into a confusion of search areas, satellite ping corridors and burst frequency offset Doppler effects.

Rather than breaking the news, social media’s role in the MH370 story has been to amplify theories (whether correct or incorrect), collate information, and highlight better sources. News and developments have come from specific reporters and teams of reporters with deeply specialised knowledge and sources developed over years of work – Jon Ostrower, Andy Pasztor and Jack Nicas at The Wall Street Journal perhaps most notably.

China-bound and with a majority of passengers Chinese, Chinese regulation of internationally popular social media like Twitter and Facebook also changed the dynamic of the MH370 story on social media, particularly Western social media. Sina Weibo and other Chinese-language sites are driving discussionbehind the Great Firewall of China, yet are by and large isolated from international, primarily English-language, sites.

In contrast to Ethiopian Airlines’ social media silence during the ET702 hijacking, Malaysia Airlines’ social media response to the MH370 disappearance has been regular and frequent. At the beginning of the story, @MAS and the airline’s Facebook page issued regular updates (and “no update” updates), in a sombre tone, and communicated specific information that social media amplified and passed on.

QF32: the story would develop differently today

Images from Batam of debris from QF32’s uncontained engine failure in 2010 might today have flashed around Twitter even faster than they spread across the media three-and-a half years ago. Wild speculation about and low-quality images of a crashed Qantas aircraft on an Indonesian island would likely spread faster now than they did then.

But the flip side of instantaneous publishing, available to anyone with a smartphone, is that experts can debunk incorrect information and provide context for what is being shown. That happens live on Twitter; in the news media, it can take hours.

If an incident like QF32 were to happen today, the images from Batam would likely be analysed as fast as they spread: Is this a current image? Are there hallmarks of fakery? Is it from an aircraft that the relevant airline currently operates? Is it in a place along a route where the aircraft might reasonably be? Public ADS-B data would also have shown VH-OQA continuing in flight as the flightcrew confirmed control of their aircraft and guidedit to Singapore. As with ET702, live, up-to-the-second information about QF32’s altitude, heading and transponder codes would be tweeted out by experts. Screenshots of flight tracking sites and apps like Planefinder or Flightradar24 would demonstrate the information’s legitimacy and currency.

Singapore Air Traffic Control is also covered by LiveATC. The flight crew’s communications with the tower would be livetweeted. (Perhaps even by pilots like Richard de Crespigny on his own Twitter account, @RichardDeCrep. ) If QF32 were to happen on the growing numbers of international aircraft with inflight connectivity – not Qantas, yet, though – we might even see live images and text accounts from inside the cabin, showing and describing what was going on during the incident.

And it would all be rolled into a #QF32 hashtag.