| July 7, 2005 | Awakened to London Blasts |
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When you work in online news, today is one of those terrible days when you wake up to 10 or more alerts from the AP coming in on your Blackberry one after the other. Pop. Pop. Pop. The messages say things like "LONDON (AP) Police have reported \'a number of fatalities' at one London subway station" and "LONDON (AP) Hospital officials say 190 people are being treated for injuries from explosions in central London." It is a terrible feeling. My phone rings before the alarm goes off at 7a.m. I wake up and pull the laptop off the floor and up into bed with me. More than 10 Yahoo! Messenger windows are active and highlighted in bright orange at the bottom of my screen as I sit in bed in a similarly bright orange Trainspotting T-shirt (that used to belong to J.P. before he disappeared). The active Messenger windows are all of my Yahoo! news co-producers (in Canada, East Coast, West Coast, and London) who are pinging me to join voice chats to discuss how to handle this news on our front doors and portal pages. Everybody is so on top of it, but still we're scrambling to stay on top of the latest angles: How many dead? How many injured? Is Al-Queda being officially blamed? My friend Clare in the Yahoo! London office is also telling me via Messenger that she narrowly missed getting onto the bus that minutes later exploded. She decided to take a faster bus this morning instead. I'm telling her that I'm glad she's OK, but this is all pretty horrible. If you want to read the latest news on this story, check out the Yahoo! Full Coverage page. The people working on it -- my friends and colleagues on the Full Coverage team -- are updating it with the best articles, info and photos available online. Also, check out the London bomb blast Flickr pool (sent to me by Esther). posted by Jess Barron @ 7:00 AM 
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