BigShinyThing

From the first reports on LBC to the BBC website, main media providers were initally clueless as to what was going on and reliant on (and imploring for) those on the ground (ie ‘ordinary people’) to report what they saw via email, photophone and digital camera. Within 30 minutes of the tube network lockdown, blog search engine Technorati provided links to people’s personal reports. Bloggers who covered the atrocity saw their web access statistics skyrocket as the public voraciously sought first-hand breaking news.

Even after the rolling news services such as BBC 24 were in play, they needed images such as these to ground their reports. Also, these ‘amateur’ witnesses may yet hold the vital evidence and key images of the attacks that escape CCTV in the most watched city on earth. Flickr already has a dedicated page to the events and Wikipedia the most exhaustive (and accurate) account of what actually happened. Multiple media providers have since analysed how the blogs reported the story first.

Note: shortly after this was posted the UK police started appealing for footage and photos as evidence - the UK public is also providing its own panopticon.

The photo above was taken outside a bus stop in Hackney on 8th July 2005. It reads, in bright pink lipstick, “Do we have to pick sides?”

70 and counting photos on Flickr following Friday’s deluge… related words ‘festival’, ‘mud’ and ‘tor’. My boyfriend and I were sitting smugly in the pub last night showing everybody photos from the scene sent by friends. This is one event that is being mainly documented by people themselves rather than the media.

White Stripes rocked!

More diy photojournalism - the BBC invites readers to send in their own photographs of Live 8.

The Financial Times covered this story back in November last year but Tyler Brule has now picked up on it for his rather tame media show The Desk (BBC 4 Wednesdays). Koreans vote for their favourite stories and the top ones win monetary prizes. In a country where the conventional and state media is tightly controlled, one ohmynews ‘citizen reporter’ (as the site calls them) has recently won the equivalent of $20k (the annual wage in Korea) for a story criticising the government.

For non Korean speakers the international site is here. It also proves founder Oh Yeon Ho’s global ambitions… he has also been busy evangelising about model of ohmynews and citizen reporting .

The UK print media is increasingly drawing on gossip sites such as Popbitch and Gawker to feed its stories, a CNN journalist has been brought down by bloggers and the BBC successfully conned by The Yes Men. And this is only in recent months. Is bottom-up media such as ohmynews.com where we will get our most trusted information from in the future? And as Oh Yeon Ho predicts, is this the end of 20th century style journalism?