One of our bloggers broke the Obama running mate story. Here's how:
He knew that the candidate's planes go into shop for re-painting around the time of the announcement. He put a call out to his readers to keep their eyes peeled - and they came back with details of a flight which gave away the identity of the running mate.
So far, so good crowd-sourced journalism. What's slightly disappointing is that the mainstream media and established blogger who followed up on his spot so completely failed to credit him. Flight Global web editor Michael Targett puts it thus:
According to Jon, his tip on the flight was picked up by a well known US political blogger and then CNN and FOX mentioned the flight (but not FlightBlogger) on air. Unfortunately the blogger in question failed link to FlightBlogger directly (bad form!), but a FB twitter caused a 2000 page view jump in traffic in about an hour on Friday afternoon well BEFORE the VP news broke.
So, full marks for a good use of Twitter and major demerits for the established players who took the story and ran...
Interesting. Flightblogger must have known about how the Kerry-Edwards ticket emerged in 2004. Clever to recall this and attempt the same technique four years later.