London bombings: Citizen Journalism arrives to TV

Continuing on Alan's theme in the previous posting.. 

We've seen the advent of citizen journalism in the print media in such cases as Oh My News (and the web obviously especially with blogging). There have been many isolated cases of citizens happening to capture amateur video from the Rodney King's beating to the World Trade Center attacks of 7/11. In the TV world, these were still the exceptions, and TV broadcasting did the majority of the coverage. The last big event to be still dominated by professional TV journalism was the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, where for example the BBC received some 70 amateur video clips, but their vast majority of clips aired were by professional journalists.

The 7/7 bombings of London last week, are now the first major news event to have the majority of the video content provided by amateur journalists. In an event that was shorter in duration, and much much MUCH more condensed in geographical area coverage - than the Tsunami half a year earlier - yet the London event had over 300 video clips sent to the BBC alone (in addition to over 1000 still images) according to today's Financial Times. Helen Boaden, Director of the BBC News said, "No one knows where this is going to take us. The gap between the professional and non-professional news gatherers is getting narrower." Simon Bucks, Associate Editor of Sky News echoes these themes by saying, "This is probably the first big story in Britain where we have seen this effect, where camera phones allow eyewitnesses a method of recording news and getting it broadcast."

With the rapid spread of cameraphones worldwide, such citizen journalism becomes a much more widely spread resource than even the world's largest news gathering organizations, like CNN or BBC can hope to maintain. Thus increasingly we will see the early footage of unanticipated breaking news stories captured by amateour journalists.

Now an editorial comment by me (and I believe Alan would agree) - I think these citizen journalists should be both recognised and paid, like we show in the Oh My News case study in our book. The BBC is taking full rights of anything submitted but does not pay its amateur contributors. Shame on you BBC, how dare you! Sky News pays half of its freelance rate, or 250 UKP for material that is used. That is how it should be. And the BBC cannot possibly claim any financial reasons for not paying for this content. If the BBC cannot rush a reporter onto the site, and wants to air footage of a news event, then pay the person who produced it !

Comments

wow get a life u sad nobs you no many people died in this horific incident an all u can do is talk about damage been done to the comunity high grounds. how about doing your own time at home and take a minute to remember those forgotten. SELFISH