Harold Bride, wireless operator of the RMS Titanic
Harold Bride, surviving wireless operator of the RMS Titanic, is carried up the ramp of a ship with his feet in bandages. From the moment that a brief Associated Press dispatch relayed the wireless distress call — “Titanic ... reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said that immediate assistance was required” — reporters and editors scrambled. In ways that seem familiar today, they adapted a dawning newsgathering technology and organized saturation coverage and managed to cover what one authority calls “the first really, truly international news event where anyone anywhere in the world could pick up a newspaper and read about it.”
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Less than 24 hours after RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, Billings residents 3,000 miles away were reading the first dispatches from Halifax, Nova Scotia, the nearest port to the scene of unimaginable tragedy.