ABSTRACT
The birth of a child to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in July 2013 provided evidence of a continued global journalism focus on the United Kingdom as correspondents from around the world gathered outside the maternity hospital in London. Described variously as a ‘show’, a ‘scrum’, and a ‘frenzy’, the journalists themselves—a collection of about 200 reporters, camera operators, technicians, photographers, and producers— became the centre of some attention as they waited in the street for up to three weeks on eight- to ten-hour shifts for the royal birth. Symbolically, the first to set up outside St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington was a cameraman from the Associated Press Television News (APTN), the American agency’s video operation based in London. At the same time, AP Global Media Services, the agency’s production arm, offered its television clients five stand-up locations from which to cover the event (AP, 2013). CNN broadcast from a webcam set up outside the hospital, and the US network ABC took a ‘live’ feed. While senior correspondents from the likes of the Washington Post and New York Times joined them (Mullin, 2013), the chief foreign correspondent of People magazine reported from the duchess’s home village in Berkshire. The reason for all this journalistic interest was obvious: in one hour, 13 per cent of all media content consumed in the United States was about the birth, and the announcement previously that the duchess had gone into labour prompted almost half a million tweets, 29 per cent of them in the United States (Faull, 2013; Macleod, 2013).
