The story I did in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 26-29 November 2008.
While working for CBS News London last fall, I did a lot of breaking news work, and probably my biggest story was on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. Interestingly enough, my entrance into the Twitter community had come only days earlier, and in hindsight, could not have come at a better time.
I was sitting at the news desk doing a bit of research for the story I was producing the next morning, and happened to get sidetracked looking up information about this "thrilling new movie" called Slumdog Millionaire. So I typed "Mumbai" into search.twitter.com, and what came up had nothing to do with a film...more a nightmare. I was pretty shocked at first to see "hundreds feared dead in mass shooting in Mumbai", "bombs destroy Mumbai train station", and "mass murder in Mumbai" popping up on the Twitter hashtag. To add to my shock was the fact that NONE of our wire services at the bureau, which included AP Wires, Reuters, European Broadcasting Network, Eurovision, and AFP, had a single blip about anything happening in Mumbai. So I told Andy, my bureau chief, that something was going on, and he told me to "keep an eye on it."
Twenty minutes later, up popped Reuters and AP flashes which went something along the lines of "Several heavily-armed gunmen attack Mumbai, India, hundreds feared dead." The newsroom went into breaking-news mode twenty minutes after I had done so. Mumbai-area television was linked up via satellite. Stringers were called. But how big was this story? Over the next few days, we would figure it out.
It was the day before Thanksgiving, an American holiday that had no real meaning to the mostly non-American staff at the London bureau, and I got a sudden feeling that I may be missing out on Thanksgiving for the first time in my 20 years. As rumours, body counts, photos, and video started to stream in to Twitter at a ridiculous pace, I found myself trying to keep up with everything while trying to relay all the information I was getting to our web guy, Tucker, and to the rest of the staff. After all, they had little idea what was going on, as all of their info was coming in from Sky and the Beeb. I soon discovered NDTV and CNN-ISN, the two main English-language channels that were covering the story the best as it unfolded, which meant video for us. On Twitter, people who were on the ground in Mumbai were posting photos to Flickr and video to vimeo as well as first-hand accounts of what was going on because they were there watching on the ground. A few emails later and I had "stringers" on the ground feeding me information on everything they could see, as well as access to their photo caches. Breaking news for cbsnews.com.
I stayed at the bureau until after midnight GMT that night, after we opened Nightly News with Katie with the story. I had to field produce live shots in the morning at 5 a.m., so I was sent back home to Earl's Court after a 14-hour day. I got back up at 4:30 a.m. and, thanks to the company, got a cab back to Chiswick. They had re-assigned a field producer to do the live shots that morning...my new job was to monitor everything Mumbai, whether it be on the web (which was their main focus for me, as all of this new web stuff was pretty taboo to them) or on TV. Whatever was happening in Mumbai, I was the bureau's hub of information.
The terrorists were still in full-swing, of course, and the web was still blowing up with information. Now, more people had hopped onto the Twitter bandwagon, and because of this, there were some crazy rumours and false facts being thrown around, as there are in any crisis situation. Mob mentality took over sometimes, but thanks to the work of the online community, fact-checking and sourcing prevailed (despite difficulties) and I had a catalogue of information that probably few other people in the world had at that point. I stayed up on the story all day and into the evening. My flatmates had cooked a huge Thanksgiving dinner, but I was to have leftovers that night. There was no way I was leaving this ongoing crisis.
Tweetgrid.com became quite a source for me as more information came out about links to Pakistan and the obvious mounting tension that meant due to their historic clashing. So a 2x2 grid with #Mumbai, #Pakistan, #Terrorist, and #India was a major help to me.
I started researching the implications and motivations behind the attacks. Since there was still so much information that was out there and so little being confirmed by any authorities in India, it was difficult. The Nariman House, two major hotels, a train depot, and a boat? Nothing tied together, and it all seemed more and more like a group of people were hellbent on murdering as many people as possible. By now, CBS had sent teams from our bureau and one of the Asia bureaus to Mumbai, where they were to be set up with fixers. I had suggested some Indian journalists I had been communicating with because I knew had been covering the events since the moment they happened, but the company already had some people in the area.
I stayed holed-up in my newly-designated office in the bureau for the better part of five days covering the situation. Two television monitors and three computer monitors were my best friends in that office for those long yet exhilirating hours I covered the story. I'm not sure if my immersion into the story was good or bad; I got kind of emotional (probably due to the major lack of sleep and caffeine and nicotine-induced stimulization) as the story continued to go on and the body count grew higher and higher. I think it all sort of came to a climax when I found out about Moshe, the young Jewish boy whose entire family was killed inside the Nariman House and who was rescued by his nanny. That, coupled with the emotional Indian TV coverage and enflamed emotions on the Internet made it all pretty overwhelming.
Hours later, the Nariman House, Taj, and Oberoi Hotels were cleared of the terrorists, albeit at astounding costs. When the Taj was finally declared safe, after going to tell the weekend producer, Agnes, I went back into my office, shut off all the monitors for about 15 minutes, and just laid my head down. I would go into work the rest of the weekend to work on follow-ups for the weekend shows and to get ready for live shots on Monday morning, but I was on cruise-control after the adrenaline-induced few days that had come before.
I was proud of myself. I had successfully covered my biggest-to-date international story (the Finland Uni. shooting and 2008 Mississippi River floods were the others) and had earned some respect from my colleagues. I knew that I wanted to cover international news from then on. There were so many stories in that story. Hundreds, if not thousands. And I knew, because of the response I had seen on the Internet, that there was a major market for these stories. Another thing I noticed was a major lack of American coverage of the attacks. This was one of the biggest terrorist attacks in the decade and had unbeknownst international implications because of the severe tensions between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-ready nations, yet Americans largely turned a blind eye to the situation. Many of my co-workers in London noticed the same. I feel, as an American, that we do not understand the world outside of our nation, and I find that completely inexcusable.
I read a book, In The Hot Zone, by journalist Kevin Sites, in which he says:
"We have unparalleled access to information, yet on the most important matters of our responsibility as global citizens, we live in information poverty. America is a third-world nation in its per capita knowledge of the people, issues and events outside its borders."
After seeing such a lackluster response from America in regards to the situation I helped cover, I couldn't agree more. And what does it serve as for me now in regards to my future?
Motivation.
Motivation to inform Americans of what every other developed nation in the world sees as inherent to their every day life: what is going on around them. We are a world of nations, not a world of nation. We have a responsibility to ourselves and the rest of the world to know how we fit into and affect not only the world around us, but the world as a whole, and I feel like the sooner this happens, the better off everyone will be.
173 dead, 308 wounded. This was not a small ordeal.
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