Wanna know which experienced journalists were laid off today?…Yeah, I don’t really want to hear about it anymore either. But if you’re curious, check out Twitter’s new feed: The Media is Dying.
By Rima Abdelkader
CNN was the only television news outlet to report from inside Iraq when the Persian Gulf War struck in 1991. Seventeen years later, sophisticated technologies and the Web replaced America’s major television network as the premier place for news in the attack on Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel.
People reported the attacks as soon as it happened through these revolutionary devices. They supplied continued updates and analysis while CNN regrettably was forced to defer to its Indian affiliate station IBN for coverage due to a reported expired license. When CNN correspondents reported the attacks over the phone, I quickly turned online.
I wasn’t the only one. People all around the world were. Mobile phones, SMS texting, the South Asian American Journalists Association, micro-blogging site Twitter, and blogs like Mumbai Help and Global Voices offered extensive exclusive coverage of the attacks. The victims even turned to some of these devices to find relatives and to seek immediate emergency relief.
India, Manoj Kanojia, 27, cries as he speaks to his mother on the phone at a hospital in Mumbai, India, Saturday, Nov. 29, 2008. Manoj suffered two bullet injuries in Wednesday's shooting at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai. A 60-hour terror rampage that killed at least 195 people across India's financial capital ended Saturday when commandos killed the last three gunmen inside a luxury hotel while it was engulfed in flames. (AP Photo/Gautam Singh)
Sumita Batra, 39, right, and her daughter Maya, 13, receive text messages from a friend who is in Mumbai for the holiday season, as she monitors the news on Thursday, Nov. 27 2008, at her home in Artesia, Calif. Batra, who is originally form India, owns a chain of Indian-influenced beauty salons in Southern California. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
A foreign tourist breaks down after being rescued safely from a hotel following an attack in Mumbai in Mumbai, India, Wednesday night, Nov. 26, 2008. Teams of heavily armed gunmen stormed luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, hospitals and a crowded train station in coordinated attacks across India's financial capital Wednesday night, killing at least 78 people and taking Westerners hostage, police said. (AP Photo)
A relative of the Holtzberg family, Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, speaks on the phone at the Holtzberg family house in the northern Israeli city of Afula, Thursday, Nov. 27, 2008. Relatives of an Israeli couple trapped in a Jewish center taken over by gunmen in the Indian city of Mumbai gathered in prayer at a family home on Thursday, desperately trying to find out whether their loved ones were safe. The family of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivki, said they knew nothing beyond reports that the couple's 2-year-old son had been rescued, but four people in the building were "unconscious." (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)
The Huffington Post asked CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour or “Wherever there’s war, there’s Amanpour” for her view of citizen journalists and bloggers and whether she utilizes them in her coverage.
Though Amanpour recognized the importance of bloggers and citizen journos especially “in closed societies such as Burma,” she believed that “no matter how sophisticated the delivery platform,” she didn’t think there was or should be a substitute for professional journalism.
Professional journalism “comes with training, with experience, with credibility, with developing trust based on the accuracy of your record in the field,” the war correspondent said.
I agree, but I don’t think the question is about substitution.
My professor Sandeep Junnakar raised a noteworthy perspective in class on Thursday. As journalists, he thought, we have to learn how to be credible and trusted curators of citizen journalism. I agree.
I learned first-hand the effect of these sophisticated technologies on the victims themselves while I was in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. One student said she deferred to Facebook to contact her friends and classmates when she couldn’t reach them over the phone.
Amanpour, however, is right to point out Burma as an example where citizen journalism and blogging is vital (or Myanmar, as the U.N. calls it). Bloggers inside that country offered exclusive coverage during and after the cyclone while journalists, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his humanitarian envoy John Holmes had to request a visa to visit the hardest-hit areas from Cyclone Nargis. The U.N. Chief wrote two letters at one point after Senior General Than Swe ignored his repeated phone calls.
The effect of the Mumbai attacks has not only transformed coverage of conflict globally, but even the way emergency relief is accessed. The Mumbai victims turned to these sophisticated devices quicker than they did to CNN. That’s groundbreaking.
Check Columbia Journalism Review’s open thread on Twittering. Though not closed to its benefits, I’m not a Twitter fan, primarily for the bolded reason below. Thread highlights:
“I’ve found out the following from twitter: that my neighborhood in West Hollywood was in lockdown, being searched for an armed gunman; that the earthquake I felt was powerful but doing little damage, and that the NoOnProp8 protests in my neighborhood were peaceful but growing exponentially. I got this info minutes – and in some other cases, hours – before it was available from other news sources online.”
“What does get lost with this tool is it is missing a specific socioeconomic class of people that journalists should not ignore. It just requires them to go out and talk to them face to face – and that isn’t as instant as the group of people on Twitter.”
I’d go further than UMiz new media prof, Jen Reeves, above, and say that Twitter excludes most of the world’s people and what’s happening to them in their neighborhoods. I care less about the platform, more about whom I’m talking to. So far, Twitter is breaking news/running commentary from the college-educated, technofiles and the upper middle class. Our media is already an echo chamber for the privileged so I’m cautious of any technology making it easier to remain that way. It’d be very cool though, if people in Brownsville, Bed-Stuy, Upper Harlem, the South Bronx and Jamaica, Queens could Twitter with each other and the privileged. Who wants to help me invent that platform?
“I don’t know, John. Should journalists use the telephone? The fact that you cannot see the other person is only the most obvious of that platform’s limitations. What do others think? Join the conversation: is “telephone” just a stupid audio trick?”
“Twitter takes nothing, it’s only a fragment of the whole that makes a news story.
In a 24/7 news cycle it is probably one of the greatest (and cheapest) ways to gather and distribute information. That is, if journalists are open to learn how to use Twitter, and listen. Without ever forgetting the basics of the trade.”“Maybe one of the Tweet Revolutionaries can explain how Twitter helps with the much more crucial tasks of connecting dots, situating events in their proper context, explaining and analyzing complex issues, etc. If our information culture did a better job at the latter, I suppose I would be a lot less concerned about all the hype devoted to the former.”
“And these “Tweet Revolutionaries” you refer to, who are supposed to unfold the awesomeness of Twitter for explanation, background, context, as well as breaking news, of course… who are they? Or are these simply the people you really, really, really want to argue with, whether or not they exist?”
“I think journalists should follow people relevant to their beat in order to get some sense of the what people are talking about and to cultivate sources. Twitter may not connect the dots, but it does an awesome job of letting you subscribe to lots and lots of important ones.”
Read more (and comment!) on CJR’s page.
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.
Click here to watch a video of the Stewart/Colbert election coverage and how they did (or didn’t) pull an Anderson Cooper the other night.
For all of you interactive geniuses out there with your bloggin’ and all that twitter-ness, you might want to subscribe to Stephen Colbert’s Simul-tube. It’s on the syllabus for Interactive II.
P.S. Any tech-savvy folks know how to embed this type of video in a post?
CNN.com posted an article on the Obama-McCain debate just nine minutes after the two candidates shook hands. NPR clocked in at twenty minutes. Dinosaurs compared to CUNY J-school twitters (or is it tweeters?) and New York Times bloggers who had published their reactions, predictions, analyses, and reports, before moderator Bob Schieffer had even introduced the second topic. While many see this as democracy-in-action, I see it as somewhat irresponsible.
To me, instant journalism is sort of like running on a treadmill while eating a sandwich (stay with me). The meal hasn’t even been digested, and if nothing else, the sandwich will certainly distract from the act of running (or vice-versa, but either way the end result is sure to be messy).
Don’t get me wrong; I know that deadlines and timeliness are the essence of journalism, which is fine. But there’s a difference between getting a story out by the next morning’s paper and getting the story out before the event is even done. The latter overwhelms me. Not just as a journalist anticipating a career that might obligate me to do some live blogging and desperate praying that no one finds this post. But also as a consumer of media. Misinformation is one of the largest problems with breaking news.
The most famous example may be 9/11 when reports were changing with each hour that passed. “Accident” became “potential terrorist attack in New York,” which then became a “confirmed attack on the United States.” And under those circumstances, not only is that completely fine, that’s completely necessary. But not everything is breaking news. Not everything needs to be dished out to the public on a minute-by-minute basis, particularly when it involves analysis and opinion. There’s a danger in that. New information gives new meaning and context to something old.
NPR and CNN know that. They each posted articles within the first half hour of the debate entitled “Economy Takes Center Stage in FInal Debate,” and “McCain, Obama Debate their Tax Plans,” respectively. Now, at 12:55am, I am unable to find these articles on their websites. It seems they updated the articles, and retitled them after apparently realizing that their original ways of conceiving the debate were inaccurate.
I remember learning, in elementary school, about a Native American culture that didn’t speak unless there was something essential to say. There was no small talk, no blabbering, no thinking out-loud. Just silence, until there was something well thought out and meaningful to say. I think there’s something to that.