I'm watching a fascinating overlap of social and traditional media here — the live coverage of a car chase out on the 91 Freeway. A murder suspect in a black Mercedes led police on an hour-long chase and it's been reported — on my iPhone, then on my desktop computer and now on an early edition of KCAL-TV Channel 9 News — by my favorite newsguy, Stu Mundel. He's in a helicopter and he and his pilot were the first on the scene.
At first, Stu was covering it on Periscope and Twitter. That's where I first got notice of the pursuit. Then I switched over and watched it on the KCAL-TV 9 website, which is where it was streaming. The chase started in the city of Compton where police tried to pull the driver over. He ran and soon was on the freeway, sometimes driving about 20 MPH but occasionally speeding up. At points when he ran into slow-moving traffic, he began swerving and squeezing through cars, scraping and bumping several autos.
At one point during the slower portions of the chase, Stu announced on the web that he and his pilot had to stop covering the pursuit, go to Fullerton Airport to refuel, then they flew back and resumed coverage. Around 7:20, he excitedly announced that the coverage would start on broadcast television at 7:30. Channel 9 had to wait until a rerun of Two Broke Girls concluded.
When it did, Mundel was no longer a one-man show as he was joined by the in-studio KHJ anchors. They went with it just in time to watch the Mercedes hit a couple of spike strips on a long stretch of freeway with no other cars. The tires went out, the car began swerving and hitting the rails until it finally came to a halt. As I'm typing this, there's a standstill out there: No sign of activity in the Mercedes, a bank of police cars watching it a few yards back. The suspect was reported as "possibly armed" so they don't want to approach and Stu says they're waiting for a S.W.A.T. team to arrive, though everyone suspects the driver inside took his own life fifteen or twenty minutes ago.
None of that interests me so much as the fact that "social media" had the story first…and there were Stu Mundel and his pilot broadcasting to cellphones and computer screens for an hour or so. There are probably motorists stranded in the massive traffic backup on the 91 who have been watching this on their phones and some of them have also contributed. Channel 9 is showing photos which were taken by some of those drivers. They sent them in or posted them to social media and now they're part of the TV reporting.
This is a new kind of news coverage. I was not only watching it as it happened, I was watching before the TV channel started covering it. Stu — the man I refer to as the Vin Scully of Police Chases — was doing a great show, talking to Periscope followers, answering questions from Twitter, discussing not only what was happening below him but also explaining the problems and challenges of covering it all from the air. In a time when news couldn't be more distrusted and (often) somewhat phony, here's raw, unedited reporting getting to us immediately in real time. Amazing.