Michael Jackson - what happened?

1.15.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Mon 29th Jun 2009

Unless you have been on Mars since Thursday you cannot have escaped the fact Michael Jackson died. Don't worry this isn't going to be a tribute post - I have been a fan, have his albums but went off him when all the allegations came out. It is a post about the follow-up especially on the Internet.

I found out about Jackson's death on Facebook and then I was confirmed on BBC with a 'news special' between Question Time and This Week. I must say at this point I didn't think Jackson's death deserved a 'news special'. Over the next few days the media went mad - I suspect this was due to the advent of 24 hour media, I was fully expecting news bulletins to lead with 'Jackson still dead!' my local radio on Friday morning compared Jackson's death to that of Diana's - at the time I disagreed but now think they may have been correct with the hype and over-reaction.

Now I know a lot of people will think me harsh for saying all the coverage was over-reaction, but someone who made some very good songs quite a while ago who until very recently (last week) had seen his star fade and his reputation become tarnished died, lots of other things happened too, yet all the newspapers seem to have Jackson pull-outs.

However there was clearly an appetite for this news - Jackson's death was the first major death for the Facebook and Twitter generation. Twitter saw 5,000 tweet per minute and a doubling of tweets per second as the news broke. Facebook saw a tripling of status updates when the news broke, including mine - most of my friends updates were actually expressing dismay that this had become major news. I did read Twitter went down for a while but have not seen this confirmed.

Google saw a massive spike at 3pm PST and thought they were under attack and used anti-spam responses. Yahoo had 800,000 clicks in ten minutes and the death was their highest clicked story ever, Yahoo News had an all time record of 16.4million visitors (they had 15.1million for Obama's election).

I suspect it is the fact everyone could get the news on the Internet and their mobiles that has made the newspapers look like an over-reaction as they were playing catch up straight away -new media won the day.

I listened to the Chart Show on Sunday, for the first time in ages. The Chart Show is now driven not by proper sales but by downloads and it showed. Man in the Mirror was number one and almost half of the top 40 were by Michael Jackson - something which would have been near impossible under the old system (producing enough CDs and getting them to the shops would have been a logistical nightmare).

Jackson's death has highlighted not only new media has the upper hand but how old media cannot compete and doesn't really know how to try.

The Jackson story will run for weeks yet - we have moved on to how he died and the refunds for the O2 gigs but new angles will be found all the time - with. I have no doubt, bloggers taking the lead by looking at various different bits of his life and his death.