alt Hacker NewsI was in the car listening to Howard Stern. Someone called in about it. They treated it as a joke at first. As it started playing out they realized that not only was it real but it was more than just a simple accident.
THat's when I flipped over to the news radio station.
Once the event was underway, I recall Howard Stern providing rather good up-to-the-minute reporting about the event, by way of guests calling in. While the mainstream news was floundering around with stale info and generally not really knowing what was going on, you could get pretty decent information from the Stern show. Apart the occasional guest callers just calling in and shouting "baba booey," his coverage was quite good. Helps to remember this was way before Twitter, and there was not much "instant live reporting from the commoners" back then. All live news came from mainstream news behemoths.