A new breed of 'citizen journalist' is using cameraphones, email and weblogs to bring the news as it happens, writes Hugh Linehan
'Sitting safely at home it was hard to remember what had happened to me that morning," Liza Pulman wrote this week. "At some points I'd even convinced myself that I simply hadn't been there. And then I saw my film. There on the TV."
The video clip Pulman had taken with her mobile phone as she was being evacuated from the train at King's Cross on July 7th had been emailed by her husband to various broadcasters and ended up as one of the defining images of last week's atrocity. In filming the event, and then disseminating it to the mass media, she has become a "citizen journalist", part of what some see as a fundamental shift in the way news is gathered and delivered.
Within an hour of last week's bombings, photographs of the aftermath were beginning to appear on the Web, emailed in mostly by people who had used their cameraphones. The ubiquity of these phones, and the increasing availability of phones with video capabilities, means that the majority of people on any city street will be able to take pictures immediately of anything that happens around them. July 7th was the most dramatic example so far of the consequences.
According to its director of news, Helen Boaden, the BBC received 50 images from members of the public within an hour of the blasts. Boaden describes the phenomenon as a "new world" and a "gear change".
"People are very media-savvy," she told the Guardian. "We saw the use of what we call 'user-generated' material in the tsunami. But as people get used to creating pictures and videos on their phones in normal life, they increasingly think of sending them to us when major incidents occur."
The phrase "citizen journalist" began to gain currency after the Asian tsunami last December, when footage - mostly shot by Western tourists in the resorts of southern Thailand as the wave hit - dominated television coverage. Affluent holidaymakers with cameras at the ready captured the moment of impact. But most people, most of the time, don't have a camera to hand. That's changing with the proliferation of cameraphones, which are currently outselling digital cameras four to one. It is estimated that 300 million will be sold around the world this year.
IN THE US, Caterina Fake, co-founder of the online photo community www.flickr.com said her office had its own moment of convergence in the early hours of that Thursday morning (local time), as staff were simultaneously alerted to the bombings by a news agency report and by photographs posted by a Flickr user. The site has since built up a substantial archive of pictures sent in by members.
"We've seen an amazing eruption of citizen journalist stories since we launched Flickr," said Fake. "It's a confluence of trends: the distribution of camera phones to regular people and the means to immediately email their photos from their phones is a big development. Also, many people are on broadband, so they're able to experience the news more fluidly than ever before. It's all about experiencing things live online, as they're happening, along with the people who are there. The immediacy of the experience is part of the magic.
"We have changed the way news is done. What we're seeing is that instant publishing has seeped into traditional journalistic practice."
Already inured to the omnipresence of CCTV, we are now entering an era where everyone around us is carrying a camera. Every incident will be recorded, every assassination will have its Zapruder, every celebrity indiscretion its paparazzo. All of this poses big questions for the traditional media. The weblogging phenomenon - where private individuals post online journals - has already challenged the pre-eminence of newspapers and broadcasters in the fields of comment and opinion. Now "citizen journalism" may force a rethink of how reportage is gathered and assembled.
Increasingly, the online arms of the big media corporations are recognising this, providing links to the best blogsites and now to picture sites such as Flickr. For the consumer, the interlinked, constantly updating world of the web provided a faster, more detailed picture of what was happening on July 7th than could be gained by passively watching TV's rolling news coverage. The fact that, in this part of the world, the events unfolded during working hours added to the popularity of online news resources, which saw a huge spike in traffic on the day. The Irish Times's online service, ireland.com, chose to temporarily lift its pay service to accommodate the huge traffic increase. It is also estimated that blogging activity increased by about 30 per cent, with nine out of 10 searches relating to the London bombings. More locally, community sites offered Londoners much more immediate information on transport developments across the city. In the days that followed, sites such as www.werenotscared.com sprang up to give people the opportunity to air their feelings.
HOWEVER, "CITIZEN JOURNALISM" has its weaknesses as well as its strengths. Part of the appeal of the web is its sense of unmediated access to what's going on, however unpleasant that may be. But picture editors already know that the images from the immediate aftermath of atrocities such as that of July 7th are often too horrific to inflict on the public. Do we really need or want to see pictures of flayed corpses, severed limbs and intestines strewn across the street? And it can surely only be a matter of time before someone uses the new technology to perpetrate a major hoax. Also, there are issues of copyright and privacy to be resolved if the mainstream media is to use the resource on a regular basis.
Last Christmas there was criticism of the way in which tsunami coverage was skewed towards the Thai resorts, where most Western tourists with their handycams were located, even though the devastation was much greater further south. But the mobile phone is a great leveller. In many developing countries, technology has skipped a generation, meaning that there are far more mobiles than there are landlines. Put that together with the ability to capture digital images and disseminate them worldwide online within minutes, and you potentially have a great tool for exposing abuses and oppression which might otherwise have remained secret until it was too late. Could Srebrenica have happened in the age of the cameraphone? Probably. Could our governments have pleaded ignorance of it at the time? Probably not.
But "citizen journalism" may also affect the ways in which terrorist attacks are themselves carried out. After all, atrocities such as the London bombings and the attack on the World Trade Centre are conceived by their perpetrators as massive media events. Mass terrorism and mass media emerged at the same time (the late 19th century) and have developed side by side ever since. If 9/11 was the ultimate spectacle for the era of rolling TV news, what effect will the new technology have on those who plan and carry out future attacks? Watch this space.