Following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month, there has been an ongoing discussion about the role citizens play in relating current events. The four day standoff lead to an eruption of news coverage, many of it driven by bloggers, tweeters and related amateur news coverage. CNN, BBC and the New York Times all set up live coverage of the events and the government even asked live reporters to stop relaying police activities online. This internet driven information frenzy highlights the power of not just citizen journalism, but live witness journalism. Jeff Jarvis of the Guardian reports that,
The witnesses are taking over the news. That will fundamentally change our experience of news, the role of witnesses and participants, the role of journalists and news organisations, and the impact reporting has on events…These are all journalistic functions - reporting, gathering, organising, verifying - that anyone can now take on. Traditional news organisations will still perform these tasks, but in new ways…The next news story will be seen live and at eye level…urgent, live, direct, emotional, personal.
Should citizens be encouraged to report what they see or do they hinder the role that established journalists play in reporting our news?
[via BuzzMachine]
[Photo credit: Sam Brooks]
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
As technologies have improved, so has the ability to share and report news from a eyewitness account. CNN has a very interesting article on how social media was used in the wake of last weeks terror attacks in Mumbai. They report, “80 messages, or “tweets,” were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.” Many people said they heard about the attacks in Mumbai on Twitter well before they saw it from the traditional news media outlets. Other tweets were updates on where people could donate blood.
CNN continued by saying “Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted. A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media”
While tweets cannot always be taken as fact, it does prove that as the technologies enabling people to share and inform improve, so does the speed and amount of information being reported. People are able to share a eyewitness account from across the world and in great volume, and it is technologies like Twitter that can aggregate this information making it accessible to the rest of the world.
If blogging empowered the citizen journalist, twittering empowered the citizen. Anyone can type 140 characters.
Please visit http://breakinghabit.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/terror-tweets/ to see how similar citizen reporting took place at Columbine and 9/11
December 9th, 2008 at 8:50 am