Andrew Hart

What a day. I heard about ABC’s exclusive interview with President Obama through Twitter mid-morning (PST).

Predictions bounced from mediaite to mediaite, most suspecting the POTUS to discuss same-sex marriage. In a moving interview, President Obama expressed his support for same-sex marriages. This move, while divisive, is seen as a gesture for the issue to be handed back to the states.

Unfortunately, the ABC clips were to go live at 3 p.m. EST, during which I had a lunch engagement. I am ashamed of checking my phone incessantly during the meal, but I feel fortunate to have witnessed such a historic event.

From ABC’s Rick Klein:

President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president.

In an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts, the president described his thought process as an “evolution” that led him to this decision, based on conversations with his staff members, openly gay and lesbian service members, and his wife and daughters.

Around the momentous interview, there were some exciting corollaries. ABC’s monopoly on the event—a rare opportunity for a network in such a frantic media ecosystem—was scooped by Matthew Keys (@ProducerMatthew), Reuters Deputy Social Media Editor.

AdWeek reports:

Keys noticed a At 2:50 p.m. EST, roughly eight minutes before ABC was to break into daytime programming with a special report, Reuters deputy social media editor Matthew Keys noticed and tweeted a URL slug essentially leaking the Obama announcement.

Minutes later, at 2:55 p.m. EST Keys tweeted a screengrab of the ABC News video, to prove the legitimacy.

So how does one catch this kind of thing? Keys responded to Adweek just after he broke the news via direct message on Twitter: “I was filtering Google results by date for site “abcnews.go.com,” came across that, noticed the URL structure was the same to what we used at KGO, which is an ABC owned-and-operated station [in San Francisco]. I put two and two together.”