What Citizen Journalism Can Do
There is a lot that’s still unknown about the deadly terrorist attacks that occurred in India’s finance capital of Mumbai this past week. Most major news organizations are, understandably, devoting a lot of resources to covering this story. But what I’ve found interesting is that this is another instance where citizen journalism has, in some ways, proved to be more effective than the mainstream media in terms of sharing information quickly and disseminating a wider range of views. The New York Times ran an article on this yesterday:
The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.
At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word “Mumbai” in it was being posted onto Twitter, a short-message service that has evolved from an oddity to a full-fledged news platform in just two years.
Those descriptions and others on Web sites and photo-sharing sites served as a chaotic but critically important link among people across the world — whether they be Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn tracking the fate of a rabbi held hostage at the Nariman House or students in Britain with loved ones back in India or people hanging on every twist and turn in the standoff while visiting relatives for Thanksgiving dinner.
Though I am personally not a fan of Twitter, it’s very cool to see the tool being employed in such a fashion. People can publish their raw thoughts and reactions for all to see in real time, greatly adding to the amount of information available (though there’s obviously a risk that a lot of that information could be incomplete or even wrong). It’s also interesting to see how texting, mobile photo uploading, and live video streaming from cell phones are increasingly becoming central tools in the journalists toolkit. This is indeed what our Interactive course is supposed to teach us; that we have to be adaptable because there are now so many new platforms that reporters have at their disposal to tell their stories.