England Earthquake

Official press release from British Geological Survey:

Note pdf file

I suppose it's "newsworthy", because this sort of quake is rarely felt here. However I felt many news programmes were OTT, as if some really cataclysmic event had happened.

If you live nearer to the edges of plates, 5.2 is a frequent occurence. In fact yesterday I believe a quake was registered at just over 6 on the Richter scale in Alaska, no fuss there

Says a lot about the state of our country, as many people thought they had burglars! House shaking for thirty seconds in the night... naah not an earthquake, but somebody making off with the telly

I'm not sure whats worse - the over reaction by broadcasters, or the over reaction to them on here.

In terms of significance to our daily lives the story was clearly over-played, however it was a talking point for most people at some point during yesterday.

It was an editorial decision to reflect that level of public interest, nothing more.

One could argue that many more important things happened yesterday (although I'm not particularly bothered about Heathrow myself), but given the 1:25 year occurrence of UK quakes of this magnitude, I think it was reasonable to fill the schedule with it yesterday.

More time and effort has been spent complaining about the coverage of the events here than went into yesterday's broadcasts.

Yeah, of course it was newsworthy, biggest UK quake in 25 years, and I'm sure a big topic of coversation up and down the country. A colleague originally from Sheffieldmentioned her family called her in the middle of the night asking if she felt it (answer was no!) and they were saying the whole street was up and about all night.

By the way, if anyone was overhyping the story, as usual it was the Evening Standard, who would describe a cat up a tree as "dramatic". Last night's Londonpaper had the quake story somewhere around page 4, with the story mentioning how while some Londoners reported feeling something, most of the city slept through it. Meanwhile the headline on the Standard's hoardings last night - "QUAKE ROCKS LONDON".

More than anything it shows the lack of any ability to report quickly from the regions. Whilst there were only a few injuries there has been little proper explanation about why & how it happened which shows up the frivolous nature of todays TV news. Journalism and accurace has been replaced by pretty news readers and garish sets.

Though the late edition of the Standard only gave a single page to the quake - and that was p9 IIRC.

Many people also believe the earthquake was caused by global warming...

Interesting to see the reaction of some viewers (albeit p*ssed up students) to the immediate coverage (or lack of it)here.

It does highlight the problem of the News 24 / World overnight simulcast, in that if a story of national, but not global, significance breaks overnight, their hands are rather tied. And to the average viewer who doesn't understand the technicalities of N24 overnight, it just appears the BBC is being slack.

Having done a quick once around the channels after the tremor, in my opinion the best coverage was done by Janice Long on Radio Two. She obviously took control of her own show and got the USGS information on air pdq and took em and text input and put it on air. After a while she got phonecalls on air from listeners too.

Sorry if it's been posted already, but a very funny video comparing Sky's breaking news coverage of the earthquake compared to the BBC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foD0YXHIknQ

It's two posts up Row. That has to be a new record.

EDIT: Although admittedly the link is discretely hidden behind the word "here".

Last week, we had one of the coldest temperatures ever recorded in stratosphere above north-west Europe; -82C I believe. No doubt due to global warming too

That is pretty shocking. Obviously my coverage of this thread is a little shaky.