Soda #FAIL

Is a screencap a photo? Not really, at least not in my book, given that the only skill required to properly execute a screencap is knowing how to press PrtScrn and then paste into Photoshop. So nope, this wouldn´t really be me trying to demonstrate my artistic abilities.

But, in the context of my Photo-A-Day project, in the sense that this would be a journal of important life events.. hell yeah, this screencap makes it 110% into my project =D

It was around 5 pm today when I got home and turned on my computer. I logged on to Twitter, only to see the awful news tweet by: a local newspaper was informing that Gustavo Cerati, lead singer of Soda Estereo, had passed away. That´s the kind of news you really don't want to start your evening with.

If you recall, Cerati is one of the most influential singers in ibero-american rock. He suffered a stroke back in May and has been in a coma ever since, and all of Latin America has been anxious to hear about any improvements in his condition.

People retweeted and retweeted the news, and 15 minutes later the tweet had snowballed into an international incident and trending topic (for those not familiar with the term, a topic goes trending on Twitter when a serious buttload of people are talking about it worldwide). All of Latin America was in shock, looking for whatever information they could find on the topic.

But something weird happened. 30 minutes later, no other bureau was mentioning the issue. Reuters, CNN, AFP... they were all silent. Even in Argentina, no news office had said a word. Weird.

Millions of people were going hysterical, on a single tweet done by our local newspaper. Just to get this into perspective, this is a newspaper that probably has 1/10th the subscribers of any local mom-and-pop newspaper in the US or anywhere else, and all of a sudden it had the attention of all of Latin America.

Of course by that time we all started to get suspicious. Nobody was saying a word about the issue, even the local paper that started it all had gone silent. Calls were made to the argentinian papers, to Cerati's medical center, to his agents... and that's when it all fell down like a ton of bricks.

It seems someone at the local paper had been a little too trigger happy, and had taken an unconfirmed rumor and put it on the digital edition and tweeted it. Cerati was still alive and in the ICU, his condition unchanged, which was confirmed via his Twitter account at 6:15 PM local time (00:15 GMT).

And despite the hoax having been debunked, the fallout on Twitter hasn´t died down yet. Almost 4 hours later  the tweets just keep coming and coming and coming.

Our local paper hasn't said a peep on the issue yet. I figure they're probably waiting for the crisis to die down,  either that or the whole editorial staff has been lynched by an angry mob.xD