72 Hours: Japan tsunami, earthquake

March 10, 2011 (March 11 in Japan) started with a single tweet that grew into one week of non-stop coverage on ProducerMatthew.com of the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Thousands of people visited ProducerMatthew.com to watch videos — some exclusively obtained — view photos and catch up on the latest accounts of the activity in Japan while they were sleeping or at work. 

Though most of the work was independent aggregation of material provided by established news organizations, some of the material was exclusively obtained and reported by this website. During the earthquake, any material exclusively obtained by ProducerMatthew.com was allowed for rebroadcast or reuse by other news organizations free of charge. ProducerMatthew.com’s YouTube channel became number one for several days following the earthquake, beating out the Associated Press and ABC News channels, which generate millions of views per day.

ProducerMatthew.com started as an news aggregation blog for Matthew Keys during his period of unemployment between October 2010 and May 2011; no financial compensation was received for the time, effort or materials spent during this coverage.

The following is posted in the order it was published, starting with the first piece of content published immediately after the earthquake:

Tweet from @raashanahmad describing Japan earthquake - this was the first piece of content published on ProducerMatthew.com one minute after the earthquake in Japan, as evident from the “one minute ago” timestamp.

The following recaps contain links to select content published during ProducerMatthew.com’s coverage of the Tohoku earthquake. These recaps were posted toward the end of a select block of coverage during the Tohoku earthquake:

March 10, 2011 10:50pm to March 11, 2011 2:00am recap

March 11, 2011 2:00am to March 11, 2011 10:00am recap

March 11, 2011 10:00am to March 11, 2011 2:00pm recap

March 11, 2011 2:00pm to March 12, 2011 8:00pm recap

March 12, 2011 8:00pm to March 13, 2011 8:00am recap

March 13, 2011 8:00am to March 14, 2011 8:00am recap

The remaining recaps contain content that falls out of the 72-hour archive period, and is here for historical purpose only.

March 14, 2011 - March 15, 2011 recap

March 15, 2011 - March 16, 2011 recap

March 16, 2011 - March 17, 2011 recap

March 17, 2011 - March 18, 2011 recap (final)

A list of news organization that reused ProducerMatthew.com’s content with attribution: