"The ‘story of the century’ brought newsrooms to life; Titanic disaster changed the way events were covered" by Christopher Sullivan | Associated Press, April 08, 2012
CAPE RACE, Newfoundland, Sunday Night, April 14 (AP) - At 10:25 o’clock tonight the White Star Line steamship Titanic called ‘CQD’ to the Marconi station here, and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said that immediate assistance was required.
The Times’ managing editor fired off assignments and began composing a new front page, trying to make sense of the silence that, according to wire updates, had followed the repeated distress calls.
Editors of many other papers would respond by “playing the story safe by printing the bulletins and writing stories that indicated that no great harm could come to the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic. Not Van Anda,’’ wrote Meyer Berger in a history of The Times. “Cold reasoning told him she was gone. Paralyzing as the thought was, he acted on it.’’
The great ship’s fate wouldn’t be confirmed for many hours. But the Times city edition headlines anticipated the worst:
New Liner Titanic Hits an Iceberg Sinking by the Bow at Midnight Women Put Off in Lifeboats Last Wireless at 12:27 a.m. Blurred
The story became a turning point for The New York Times. Its coverage set it on course to “secure claim to a position of preeminence . . . among American newspapers that it would never relinquish,’’ wrote Daniel Allen Butler in his history, “Unsinkable: The Full Story of RMS Titanic.’’
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Broadcast news, too, got a strong push with this story. David Sarnoff, a young Marconi operator, made a name for himself with days of nonstop updates from a storefront window in New York, drawing crowds so large the police had to keep order. It was the start of a career that saw Sarnoff become the long-serving head of NBC.
The Titanic went down at a time when wireless, a technology that would become ubiquitous, was just taking hold - comparable to our adjustment today to Twitter and the like.
As the stricken ship’s messages were picked up, sometimes by amateurs with Marconi receivers, “you’d get these wireless operators that knew reporters and editors at newspapers, and they said, ‘Here’s what’s going on,’ ’’ historian Butler said in an interview. “This was very much a social network - they were using dots and dashes rather than images over an LCD screen.’’
And sometimes, the fragments of news, traveling lightning fast, got garbled.
That apparently explains some reports of the ship being towed to Halifax with everyone safe. Amid the wireless chatter crackling across the airwaves, someone asked about the Titanic passengers’ safety - and the response somehow got confused with a message that another vessel was safely under tow. Butler traced the mix-up to “two fragments picked up by a wireless station in Massachusetts.’’
At first, reporters simply tried to clarify the “what’’ - what had happened 400 miles off the Newfoundland coast.
The Titanic’s owners, the White Star Line, contributed to the early, contradictory reporting with their silence or misleading statements. Rumors spread, along with hopeful speculation. Finally, an emotional White Star executive, Phillip A.S. Franklin, addressed the press.
He later described the scene: “I got off the first line and a half, where it said, ‘The Titanic sank at 2 o’clock a.m.,’ and there was not a reporter left in the room - they were so anxious to get out to telephone the news.’’
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