Trigger warning: terrorism.
We have passed the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 attack on London and the day rightly was spent reflecting and allowing those involved to speak.
On the day, there were some powerful testimonies from survivors. For example, the TikTok clip of the woman whose life was saved by an off-duty police officer who was reunited for the first time in years was pure emotion.
But also on LinkedIn, posts from former Metropolitan Police comms people recalling their day.
The attacks killed 52 people and injured almost 800 people.
In 2025, the 7/7 attack found me by dropping into my timeline.
But in 2005, there was no timeline to drop into. Mobile phones were for phone calls and texting and when an emergency happened people’s attention turned to TV and radio. So it was for me twenty years ago in a council press office. We followed on BBC News 24 as the timeline moved from ‘power surge’ to ‘explosion’ and then grimly to ‘terror attack.’
What I didn’t know then was that day was a true watershed moment in communications.
For the first time, the internet overtook the newsroom as the prime source of breaking news.
It was the early crowdsourced web – Wikipedia – which emerged as the most updated source. Breaking news was not being set by newsrooms but by people on the street with camera phones. Images were coming from survivors first not TV news crews. The primary images of 9/11 four years before had come from TV news. In 2005, they started to come from people in the Tube carriages.
Let me explain.
The timeline
It’s striking to compare how 7/7 played out to how things now routinely play out. Back then there was the luxury of time.
8.50am – Simultaneous explosions.
9.15am – Metropolitan Police announced an ‘incident’ prompting London radio radio stations to report ‘incidents’ on the Tube.
9.28am – The first mention of the incident on the Wikinews arm of Wikipedia.
10.18am – The Wikipedia page that captures the incident is created with the first of thousands of edits.
10.30am – Gold Control starts at Metropolitan Police signifying a major incident.
10.40am – Government sources confirm 20 dead.
11.10am – Met Police confirm a co-ordinated terror attack.
11.15am – Met Police begin a live press conference.
User generated content
Mobile phones in 2005 could take grainy pictures which could then be emailed and texted. Tube passenger Adam Stacey takes an image of himself trapped in the Tube tunnel with dust, light and other passengers. He sends it to Eliot Ward who then uploads it to Wikipedia and to the internet. He adds a creative commons licence allowing re-use. It becomes a defining image of the incident. Today, it looks grainy and amateurish. Then, it was a glimpse into the future just as cannon balls on a post-battle in Crimea had been in 1855.
How did people get their breaking news in 2005?
In 2005, traditional news channels reigned supreme. TV and radio were the prime sources although BBC News and ITN were taking the challenge from the emerging Sky News.
Martin Blunt was a Sky reporter in 2005 and 20 years on he retraced his step that day in this news package. You can se it here:
What’s striking is the way the news was reported. Unattributed sources shaped the Sky News package including the suggestion that this could be a suicide bomb – or multiple bombs.
The 7/7 attack saw a surge in visits to traditional websites with more than a billion page views across the day on the BBC website. The BBC hosted a ‘Your Photo’s page which captured first hand images. Blogs started to be published mapping the news in realtime.
When updates landed they were often on Wikipedia first
It’s hard to fathom looking back in 2025 but Wikipedia showed the first stirrings of what the social web would look like. The first update on the site was one hour 28 minutes after the explosions by an editor called Morwena who had heard about the explosions from colleagues. It’s interesting to reflect she refrained from posting until the attacks were confirmed by traditional media inline with site policy.
In the next 24-hours, there were more than 2,000 edits from 800 volunteers to update the July 7 attack page. Even a week later the page was still being updated 100 times a day.
The page also changed its title from ‘London Underground power surge incident’ to ‘London Underground explosions’ as the information clarified. Malicious edits were also an issue, Wikipedia’s account sets out with a core team of editors fighting to maintain standards.
All this is significant because the site was being updated faster than other online news sources. Also significant, The New York Times and Newsday began quoting Wikipedia as a source of their reporting. This was unprecedented.
Yet, for all the firsts that had been created, it is worth noting that a quarter of a million people saw the updates on the day. The days of social media taking over with millions of impressions were yet to come. In the wake of the Southport murders and riots, there were more than 27 millionb impressions on Twitter alone of misinformation.
This was the first major citizen journalist UK incident
As The Guardian reported five years after 7/7, this was the first realtime incident that the UK saw through the breaking news prism of citizen reporting, the internet and early camera phones.
It was a new kind of story. Not in the sense of what happened, which was thoroughly and depressingly as anticipated, but in the way it was reported and disseminated. The mobile phone photographers, the text messagers and the bloggers – a new advance guard of amateur reporters had the London bomb story in the can before the news crews got anywhere near the scene.
The blogging platform LiveJournal also became a hub for news and personal experience. This new platform in its own way was soon to be replaced by Facebook and in particular Twitter in the London riots seven years later.
It’s interesting to read in The Guardian piece that SMS and email was the main way that the BBC got updates of the incident. There’s no surprise when you realise that SMS was the main way that people communicated with each other in 2005. Mobile networks like 4G were a long way off.
Not only that but early photo sharing site Flickr was the place online where people shared images. The site holds a place in my own heart as being the place where the Walsall Flickr group coalesced. These early social photographers would come along to several photo walks I organised.
Camera phones
The grainy image at the top of the piece was taken by a Tube passenger Adam Stacey who was trapped between Kings Cross and Russell Square. Titled ‘Trapped Underground’ the image was taken with an early camera phone and sent to his friend Alfie Dennan who published it on moblog with a creative commons licence allowing it to be reused.
Looking back its clear that people were starting to realise that a survivor could also be a reporter
The BBC itself had 50 images within the hour and almost 1,000 by the end of the day texted and emailed by people who were very often eyewitnesses.
To today’s eye, the images are low grade. They are pictures. They are not video. Yet looking back on accounts from the time its clear the surprise of commentators. Looking back five years later The Guardian commented:
“The mobile phone photographers, the text messagers and the bloggers – a new advance guard of amateur reporters – had the story in the can before the news crews got anywhere near the scene.”
Conclusion
The 7/7 attack was not the first heinous terror attack in Britain but was the very first major incident where eyewitnesses with mobile phones were shaping journalism and the first draft of history.
Just a few years later, Clay Shirky’s ‘Here Comes Everybody’ would paint an optimistic picture of how the wisdom of crowds could be connected through the social web. In 2025, the driver is not how to tap into crowdsourced content but rather how to protect people from the disinformation it can bring.
In 2005, there were traces of disinformation and the need to gatekeep. Wikipedia editors held the line that they would not post information without it first being verified. But across the available channels, there were no far-right or Russian commentators online looking to turn people against a minority.
Looking back to 2005 and you can see the future of communications emerging. This was not a moment where switch was flicked and everyone looked online for eyewitness accounts and hot takes. But it did signal a profound change that communicators are still struggling with.
The future of communications arrived in 2005. It showed that bystanders would shape the narrative and bad actors would also try and influence the story. It showed the speed of the internet was faster than more traditional ways of communicating.
It also showed that public sector comms teams needed to be faster, clearer and more accurate and were one voice in a sea of noise.
I think we’re still wrestling with this.
Creative Commons credit: ‘Trapped Underground’ taken by Adam Stacey on 7/7, 2005.
