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June 24, 2016, 12:13 p.m.
Reporting & Production

Should it stay or should it go: News outlets scramble to cover Britain’s decision to exit the European Union

Online, readers stayed up for the results: Peak traffic to BBC News, for instance, was around 4 a.m. GMT, and by 11 a.m. BBC.com had received 88 million page views.

As the votes rolled in for the U.K.’s European Union referendum, newspapers scrambled to get the historic “Leave” decision into their print pages on Friday.

The last edition of The Times of London, for instance, went to press at 5:30 a.m.

News Corp tabloid The Sun, which had positioned itself in the “Leave” camp, pushed out a 6 a.m. edition, according to The Guardian. The Wall Street Journal published an extra edition.

Online, readers stayed up for the results: Peak traffic to BBC News, for instance, was around 4 a.m. GMT, and by 11 a.m. BBC.com had received 88 million page views (BBC World News and BBC.com have “cleared schedules” for Referendum coverage all day Friday with additional special programming into the weekend.)

The BBC’s referendum Twitter bot — which my colleagues and I also followed intently instead of sleeping — tweeted live updates on the voting throughout the night.

Politico Europe, as we wrote about in more detail last week, used Apple Wallet to send notifications to readers.

The Guardian’s Mobile Innovation Lab, based out of its U.S. newsroom, continued building on its experiment with mobile push notifications (on Android/Chrome for now), with around 7,000 subscribed to the alerts. In addition to key news updates and auto-updating live results, notifications included “quotes from notable figures reacting to the outcome” and a live poll “built right into a notification.”

The Guardian is also running a Tumblr project titled 75% — a reference to the three quarters of “young voters in the U.K.” who voted to remain — to share thoughts from young voters and those still too young to vote:

75-percent-tumblr-guardian

The Financial Times has been curating a collection of reader responses from across FT.com, including one searing critique that circulated throughout last night/early morning:

Keep calm, and carry on reporting.

Photo of a Keep Calm and Carry On cover in the snow by Fi, used under a Creative Commons license.

POSTED     June 24, 2016, 12:13 p.m.
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