How G20 Ian Tomlinson footage spread shock around world

• Mix of old and new media attracted global audience
• Amateur film debated from Brazil to China

Should anyone still doubt that the era of a citizen-led, electronic news media is on the way, then the sudden arrival and rapid global spread this week of the Guardian video showing police mistreatment of Ian Tomlinson shortly before his death at the G20 protests provides compelling evidence.

Firstly, the footage was shot by a non-professional - an American fund manager visiting London - rather than one of the scores of news crews who were there at the time. More dramatically, within hours of the video going up on the guardian.co.uk website on Tuesday afternoon, it was being watched around the world as an ever-widening network of newspapers, bloggers, Twitter users and others spread the word and passed on links.

It was a perfect mix of old and new media: led by some very traditional reporting on a newspaper but with an impact all the more visceral alongside the footage showing a masked, helmeted riot officer strike Tomlinson from behind before shoving him violently to the ground.

The Guardian passed the film to the BBC, Sky News and Channel 4, who began broadcasting it. But many more people saw the footage via the internet, particularly after the video was added to YouTube, allowing other sites to embed it directly into their pages.

Last night, the top five most-read stories on guardian.co.uk were those connected to the video, with more than half a million views between them. The software that analyses online traffic figures gives an insight into this global spread by showing how viewers made their way to the relevant page.

Many came via search engines such as Google News, but thousands arrived from websites in countries including Italy, Spain and Germany, with significant numbers also arriving from the big US political blogs.

Everywhere the video was posted, readers shared their views on police tactics. On the Huffington Post site, a woman in her 50s recounted being badly intimidated by US riot officers after attending a Barack Obama election speech.

"Those police weren't there to protect the next president as much as they were there to harass citizens. I felt like I was in a police state," she wrote.

Another big group of readers arrived via Brazilian news websites. The story spread rapidly in the country, reigniting anger over the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician who was shot dead by police officers inside Stockwell underground station in London in 2005.

Elsewhere, the video and story featured on news sites as geographically varied as Denmark's Politiken newspaper, the Times of India, Toronto Sun and New Zealand's Timaru Herald.

Even in China, where police violence is rarely reported in the domestic media, readers learned of the news in the English-language China Daily.

The news also travelled in less conventional ways. A Facebook group, Justice for Ian Tomlinson, swiftly gained 7,000 members, while his name shot into the list of most commonly used terms on the microblogging site Twitter.

How the story changed ...
Wednesday April 1
Ian Tomlinson, 47, a newspaper vendor, collapses and dies at the G20 protests. In a statement that night, the Metropolitan police says that medics were temporarily impeded from helping him as "a number of missiles - believed to be bottles - were being thrown at them".

Thursday April 2
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) says it will "assess the circumstances".

Friday April 3
A postmortem finds that Tomlinson died of a heart attack. The Guardian contacts City of London police - tasked with conducting the investigation into Tomlinson's death on behalf of the IPCC - and says it has obtained photographs of him lying on the pavement at the feet of riot police.

Sunday April 5
The Guardian's photographs are published, along with the testimony of three named witnesses who describe him being hit with a baton or thrown to the ground by police. The IPCC criticises the Guardian for upsetting Tomlinson's family. It tells other journalists that there is "nothing in the story" that he had been assaulted by an officer.

Monday April 6
The IPCC confirms Tomlinson had contact with police. It continues to "manage" an investigation conducted by City police, some of whose officers were pictured at the site of Tomlinson's alleged assaults.

Tuesday April 7
At 2am, the Guardian receives video footage that clearly shows Tomlinson was hit with a baton and pushed to the floor by a riot officer. That afternoon, it publishes the footage on its website and hands a dossier of evidence to the IPCC.

Wednesday April 8
The IPCC reverses its decision to allow City police to investigate the death.

Thursday April 9
The Met suspends the officer shown in the footage; 48 hours on, he has still not been questioned by the IPCC.

Friday April 10
Tomlinson's father says he believes the police acted with excessive force.
Paul Lewis

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk April