Mat Honan for Gizmodo:
Mobile devices are turning us all into reporters. The citizen journalist hasn’t been such an important player since the days of the American Revolution. That’s largely been a cell phone phenomena; everyday people can both record and broadcast information widely, and in narrow channels.
When conditions at Occupy Oakland turned violent, I didn’t go to the San Francisco Chronicle, which had a paucity of static information. I didn’t turn to the local TV networks (one of which was off-air for a helicopter refuel), I went to Twitter and YouTube, which gave me a steady stream of reportage, video and photos from the ground, describing events as they happened.
So true. Think about how many major news items you’ve heard about on Twitter or Facebook over the past couple of years and compare that to how many you heard about on TV or radio. I usually hear about the event on Twitter and then turn on CNN and watch the two together.
“Think about how many major news items you’ve heard about on Twitter or Facebook over the past couple of years”
True – and think about how many of those have been completely bogus (“OMG A celebrity died!”) and how many have been completely unimportant. 🙂
Despite the fact that “big media” has fallen behind bloggers, Twitter and Facebook, I still much prefer reading a professional journalist’s article. Unfortunately, those journalists work for old media companies who have no idea how to publish on the web.
They’re so concerned with monetizing that they make their web content virtually unreadable – a problem considering it’s not easily accessible either. Stretching an 800-word article across 5 web pages simply to increase page impressions just kills it for me. And so are pop-over ads and survey requests.
I could live with reading 2-day-old news, but not when they make it so hard to read.
If I want INSTANT INFO, I depend on radio 1st. Here in Australia, we have government run radio (ABC) which acts independent and local at the same time. Next is, maybe, television and/or the net. It became obvious while surfing the interweb, on the radio I hearer about a plane crashing in the WTC; the radio was much faster than the web -then I go turn on the telly. Michael Jackson; again. Steve Jobs, bang on. Once I hear the general crust of the event, then I’ll search out the details and hope I don’t come across crap/rumours (SJ mock turtle-neck made by St. Croix – not). The radio has just that much more officialdom than the web to the ‘now’: as long as it’s not ‘Commercial Radio’.
The thing that bothers me about this situation is that more and more news outlets use these sources and sometimes unquestioningly.
My MO usually looks like this: Some new story breaks, I find out about it on Twitter first, then I hit reputable news sources to confirm and get further information.