News of two tsunamis

As with news about the Sendai earthquake and resulting tsunami, I heard about the 2004 Indonesian came during the middle of the night (Eastern U.S.) from the BBC. In 2004, I was listening to WBUR's overnight BBC broadcasts. Quite a bit has changed the ways that we get our news. With those changes have come changed expectations.

• A decade ago, I could pick up the BBC on shortwave. The Beeb stopped broadcasts to North America in 2001. 'BUR's BBC service isn't a straight feed. They mix in different features that may be of greater interest to New Englanders. (The regular broadcast includes a lot of news about cricket and what they call football.)
  This time, I was listening to the BBC on my Android phone with the TuneIn Radio app. I easily switched between the BBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company). [1]
• Twitter, which didn't exist in 2004, offered a rich source of on-the-shaking ground reports. I saw a couple of tweets from people looking for help with Japanese translations.
• Live online TV/video news feeds were surprisingly hard to find. Doc Searls did a good analysis of the online channels, Earthquake turns TV networks into print. I commented on his post, as did others, that the BBC was online with live news much of the time.
  I looked at Al Jazeera and would have watched them except that they used RealPlayer plug-ins for their video. RealPlayer's practices annoyed me a few years ago and I've resisted using their products.
  [3:14AM update: For reasons that aren't clear, the Al Jazeera live feed plays without additional plug-ins in the Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 browsers. Firefox is still demanding RealPlayer.
• NHK World English offers lives news in English. At this writing, a new round of multilingual tsunami warnings are coming out, along with the very scary news at the nuclear reactors. Folks in Japan are being reassured that, even if there was a meltdown, people outside a 10km radius won't have to worry.

[1]The quake occurred mid-afternoon, Japanese local time. BBC uses GMT. Australia has five time zones in use, a couple of which operate on the half-hour. Meanwhile, I'm trying to keep track of what time it is in my own house.