Attack on London: a momentous day for journalism

Broadcast
The attack was the first big breaking news story since the BBC published its new editorial guidelines that made explicit the new "accuracy is more important than speed" creed. With so many people turning to breaking news during the day, whether on the digital rolling news channels or the main networks that had ripped up their schedules, clear differences in tone, style and content were laid bare to a mass audience for the first time.

BBC News 24 was noticeably more cautious in its coverage than Sky News, which rushed to get as much information - speculation or fact - on air. ITV, meanwhile, sat somewhere between the two. In truth, the differences have been evident for some time, since the Lambert report into BBC News 24 required it to become more distinctive. But with a far bigger audience than the usual news junkie crowd, the differences hit home to many viewers for the first time.

"We get confirmed facts on air immediately but it's true we're cautious about some wire copy or internet-type rumours that we can't substantiate ourselves," says Roger Mosey, head of television news at the BBC. "At times on Thursday we were getting 'eyewitness accounts' saying completely contradictory things that couldn't possibly all be true."

In the two hours that followed the first blast, there was so much conjec ture flying around that the rolling news channels had to be very much on their guard. There are even those who believe the "power surge disruption" explanation was a deliberate piece of disinformation disseminated by the authorities to prevent panic.

Mosey says that the BBC would only "put on screen what we know is right - reports from our own correspondents, the official emergency service figures and information from members of the public that we've checked out".

This "safety first" attitude was also in evidence on radio: "We now have a very cautious approach to this. We try to get it right even if it sacrifices being first. We are seeking to ensure that our information is very strongly sourced before going with something like a casualty figure," says Stephen Mitchell, BBC head of radio news.

Nick Pollard, head of Sky News, makes a subtle distinction, saying viewers are now in tune with the rhythms of rolling news and expect a more complete picture to build up throughout the day. "We take very seriously our reputation as the place to turn to when there's big breaking news. It's what we're there for," says Pollard. "We tell viewers what we can see, what we know and what we don't know."

For today's news-savvy audiences, it was important that Sky got the news out quickly on a big developing story, he says, provided that they were told where the information came from: "We scrupulously try to tell people our source - that's something we've learned over the past three to four years."

Apart from the proliferation of user-generated content, the coverage was notable for its restraint. "It's a very fine line. I always maintained the point of view that in such a terrible incident we should show what we need to show and no more," says David Mannion, editor-in-chief of ITV News.

Mannion believes that the authorities appeared to be over-cautious in updating the casualty figures - with the result that foreign news wires and broadcasters were getting more up-to-date information from their own government sources.

"I think it was extraordinary to some degree. It seems to me that the Home Office and the Met adopted a policy of not adding to the death toll until they had informed relatives," he says, adding that it led to a situation where the people of Australia were better informed than Londoners. "That is ridiculous. We're all grown ups and I think it's treating the public with a degree of disrespect to hide the truth."
Owen Gibson

Press
"Many of us felt the angel of death brush past us yesterday morning." Suddenly even the agony aunt was a frontline reporter. Last Thursday, everyone was a potential eyewitness and the Sun's Deidre Sanders, who survived the Asian tsunami, found herself at King's Cross just after 9am, face-to-face with survivors of the underground blast. She described in spare, moving prose "the huddle of shaken men and women, with red-rimmed eyes, their faces black with soot".

Flick forward a few pages and the paper's TV critic and "Aldgate resident" Ally Ross was shocked to see his own flat flashed up on a television news report. The view from his living room window was unsettling: "Two policemen, armed with machine guns, are standing outside our packed local fun pub," he observed.

Some of the accounts were almost too grim to read. The Daily Mail reported eyewitness Carol Miller's description of the carnage at Edgware Road: "I saw an old lady who was ripped to pieces, lying between the two trains," she said. The Mail reporter added: "The force of the blast tore bodies apart and amputations were carried out at the scene." If disasters are best told in pictures, sometimes words bring home the full horror because they confront you with your own imagination.

Among the commentators there was a sharp divide between those prepared to point the finger of blame at the prime minister and the Iraq war, and others who felt it was both inappropriate, with the death toll still mounting, and wrong. In her eerily prescient blog on Thursday afternoon, the Mail's Melanie Phillips warned of "something horrible and warped ... lurking just below the surface". She was not referring to George Galloway, rather to belief that the Iraq war "has created more not less terror and that the British would not have been a target at all had we distanced ourselves from the US". The columnist continued: "I expect to see mainstream writers saying as much over the next few days."

In the event Phillips did not have to wait that long. In the Daily Mirror, Kevin Maguire, risking the ire of many of the tabloid's readers who thoroughly disliked former editor Piers Morgan's anti-war stance, asked: "Was it because of the war in Iraq? The answers are likely to make uncomfortable reading for Tony Blair ... Responsibility lies firmly with the butchers. However, when the inquest starts, the Iraq war will also be in the dock."

Shoulder to shoulder with Maguire was the former Daily Telegraph and London Evening Standard editor - and military historian - Sir Max Hastings, who wrote: "We must acknowledge that, by supporting President Bush's extravagances in his ill-named War on Terror and ill-justified invasion of Iraq, Blair has ensured that we are in the front line beside the US whether we like it or not." Thursday's events made for some strange bedfellows: the Respect MP George Galloway - branded "vile" and "a traitor" in the Sun - said much the same thing in the House of Commons.

In the Guardian, meanwhile, Robin Cook - an outspoken critic of the Iraq war - urged bridge-building with the moderate Muslim world. "The danger now is that the west's current response to the terrorist threat compounds the original error," he wrote. "So long as the struggle against terrorism is conceived as a war that can be won by military means, it is doomed to fail." Cook is no doubt one of the "many supple self-deluding figures" referred to in the Telegraph by Mark Steyn: business as usual by the governing class in the face of terrorism is "not a stiff upper lip, but a death wish", he argued. "This is the beginning of a long existential struggle for Britain and the West."

Only commentators can afford to be so certain.
James Silver

The day in numbers
It was a day in which the number of people visiting news websites soared. As office workers scrambled to find out the latest information, the BBC, Sky News and the Guardian websites reported significantly increased traffic.

BBC News accounted for 28.6% of all news page impressions in Britain on Thursday. Sky News was ranked third, with 3.8%, and Guardian Unlimited fifth with 2.4%. The Sun was the eighth most popular news destination, with a 1.4% share, narrowly behind CNN.com.

Guardian Unlimited reported that 1.3 million people accessed nearly 8m pages, the most on any one day since the website was launched. More than 500,000 of those users came from the US, while Madrid, scene of the train bombings which killed 191 people in March 2004, accounted for more visits than any other city apart from London.

The US accounted for the highest number of users, with 518,524. The UK came next with 392,029, and Canada third with 57,594. Spain accounted for the fourth largest number of visitors, with 35,636. The busiest period was between 1pm and 2pm: 770,000 pages were viewed on Guardian Unlimited, the equivalent of 213 pages a second. On a typical day, Guardian Unlimited has 3.5m-4m full-page views.

News websites accounted for 5.6% of all online traffic on Thursday, up nearly 50% on the previous day. Sky News' website rose more than 300 places in the overall web rankings to become the 62nd most visited website.

Ratings for the TV news channels were predictably high. On Thursday, Sky News recorded a 4.21% share of viewing, with BBC News 24 on 2.1% and the ITV News Channel on 0.6%.

All three news channels were simulcast on terrestrial networks for much of the day: ITV1 was first to switch, taking a rolling service from the ITV News Channel at 10.12am, which continued uninterrupted until 7pm. BBC1 followed suit later, while Five took a feed from Sky News, which was also being simulcasted by Fox News in the US. ITV seemed keen to re-establish its public service principles, breaking off only for episodes of Emmerdale and The Bill before returning with a two-hour news special fronted by Trevor McDonald from 9pm.

Despite ITV's mammoth coverage, viewers turned to the BBC in greater numbers. BBC1's early evening news more than doubled its audience: nearly 7 million viewers watched the specially extended bulletin at 6pm, more than twice the 3.3 million who tuned in at the same time the previous Thursday night. At the same time, 4.4 million were watching ITV's news coverage.
John Plunkett

PR operation
There are few occasions where public relations are as important as in the immediate aftermath of a large scale terrorist attack and the accompanying risk of widespread panic. The Metropolitan Police's PR department, alongside those of the other emergency services and local government, had long rehearsed for yesterday's events and, indeed, far worse scenarios.

"The eyes of the world are on you at times like this," says the Met's PR chief Dick Fedorcio. "Thursday's attacks began in the City of London police force area, and early on they asked us to take over the media side for them. Before too long we were dealing with all four attacks. I heard the bus blowing up as I walked into the press bureau in Scotland Yard and by then we had already started putting our plan into action.

"We took the view very early on that we would need access to a large venue. Through government support we quickly got access to the QE2 conference centre which we used for the media. Again, we had planned for that."

The Met's deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick and the disaster-hardened deputy chief constable of British Transport Police, Andy Trotter, who handled the Paddington rail disaster for the Met, fronted the press conference. "We need to find a senior police figure who is not directly involved in running the operation as we must have access to them round the clock due to the media demands," Fedorcio explains.

"In a terrorist situation the Met takes the lead over the other emergency services. Since September 11 a whole new series of structures were put in place to manage pan-London incidents under the heading London Resilience. Our initial objectives are: to convey that we are responding, to demonstrate that we are in control, and to reassure people as best and as early as we can. We also need to be as accurate as possible and not to find ourselves in a position of saying things that turn out to be untrue."

Nowhere is that more important or sensitive than when it comes to numbers of casualties. Some media executives have expressed frustration at a perceived lack of information in this area: the ITV News editor-in-chief, David Mannion, said he had been called by a Home Office press officer demanding that a newsflash saying that at least 20 people had died be taken down. "I said we wouldn't take it down, because we'd got the figure from an authoritative government source," he said.

"Numbers are very difficult to manage," admits Fedorcio. "In the Paddington rail crash there was a carriage we weren't able to get into for several days, but everyone believed a lot of people had got into it. In the event, it turned out there were hardly any bodies in there. When we have a complete body we will count that, but not before. We've had to be very careful with the bus and the train at Russell Square because we won't have a final figure until we have all the bodies out."
James Silver

US reaction
The bombings were front-page news all over the US print media. Editors were quick to stress its context in a war on terror that began for Americans with the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

Memories of September 11 2001 flooded back: "The slow realisation of the magnitude of that crime, the nagging worry that we had not seen the end of it ... " noted an editorial in the New York Times.

The New York Post, Rupert Murdoch's bombastic tabloid, devoted its first 15 pages to graphic photographs of damage and dazed and bloodied survivors, while reports on the "Massacre by Savages" stressed Anglo-American unity. Noting the "painful memories of 9/11", the Post contrasted Tony Blair's "steadfast behaviour" with the "surprisingly unfocused" George Bush, and emphasised that the London attacks were another front in the "war on terror" being waged in places such as Iraq.

"For Britain, it's 7/7," said the Los Angeles Times, stressing the vulnerability of cities in open societies to terrorist attacks. Public transit systems, said the paper, are especially at risk, yet the Bush administration's efforts to boost security were especially meagre.

The theme of continued threat at home was taken up by USA Today, America's only national newspaper. "What's being done to prevent an attack on my train, or bus, or subway?" asked an editorial, before concluding, "the stark reality is, not much". Americans, said USA Today, deserved better security. But whereas the US press reaction to 9/11 sometimes degenerated into xenophobia, the response to 7/7 was more tempered.

In contrast, the TV networks, notoriously averse to covering news from abroad, tended to emphasise local angles. Which mostly meant wondering how safe Americans' mass transit was. "The pace and tone of American TV news," noted a commentator in the LA Times, "have a way of stoking vague fears." For real news, it was best to turn to the BBC where the tone of coverage could best be described as "adult".

Like the other US newspapers, the Washington Post pointed out how new technologies shaped public perception of the London bombings. Americans felt an especial immediacy to events in London when blurry images of footage from the King's Cross blast aired on their television screens. As USA Today noted, paraphrasing the French response to 9/11, today "We are all Britons".
Peter Huck in Los Angeles