A story broke today about a mother of a disabled child from Bristol who posted a message on the website Mumsnet, which is a forum where mum's can discuss parenting issues. Riven Vincent's post received a huge response from the online community, with 1914 responses. From these responses, a huge campaign began, with thousands of people emailing and writing to David Cameron (after the addresses were posted on the Mumsnet forum,) contacting various newspapers that they had contacts with and also starting a Twitter campaign, getting celebrities such as Katie Price (who has a disabled son, as well as millions of Twitter followers) to retweet Riven's story causing it to become a trending topic. This furor has lead to David Cameron becoming aware of the problem and has lead to discussions between him and Riven.
This is the perfect example of how Internet has changed the news, as none of this would have been possible without the interent. For a start, the Mumsnet forum was what allowed Riven to post her problem and have it read by it's 600,000 registered users in the first place. As the forum made it easy for her to share this issue with so many people and for users to give feedback, it created a big stir, with new comments being posted every minute. This kind of response would simply not have been possible without the interent. The internet also played an instrumental role in spreading awareness of Riven's problem, particularly Twitter, where it became a trending topic. It could be described as 'going viral;' it appaeared to be opping up everywhere, in a way that could only happen becuase of the interent. In this case the internet did not only help to give the story a huge amount of coverage quickly but it can also be argued that without the internet (more specifically, Mumsnet) it wouldn't have even been a news story at all.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-12237100
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12238447
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/1129157-have-asked-ss-to-take-dd-into-care
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