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 morning paper has just landed on our desk pic.twitter.com/NLhVa0G6le
— Guardian politics (@GdnPolitics) June 24, 2016
The last edition of The Times of London, for instance, went to press at 5:30 a.m.
@ylichterman The Times has four editions overnight, our last one goes to press @ 05.30 https://t.co/X5niNwrHVY
— JessicaRCL (@JessicaRCL) June 24, 2016
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.
EXTRA EXTRA WSJ published an EXTRA edition in Europe pic.twitter.com/KWmc8ck6Aw
— Reid J. Epstein (@reidepstein) June 24, 2016
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.)
People stayed up for the #euref result. Peak traffic to @bbc news about 4am, we expected 6:30-7:30am pic.twitter.com/K9XZPwMePu
— Alex Watson (@Sifter) June 24, 2016
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.
Final result: Leave 51.9% – Remain 48.1%. Explore the full results: https://t.co/4hLZog4LtF #EURef pic.twitter.com/MKRPe9WJe1
— BBC Referendum (@BBCReferendum) June 24, 2016
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:
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:
This comment from a reader of the FT puts it better than I ever could. pic.twitter.com/fXupQYi24O
— mooooo (@AD7863) June 24, 2016
Keep calm, and carry on reporting.