October 27, 2007

Wild Fires Fan Citizen Journalism Flames

The Baltimore Sun reports on the big role that citizen journalists played in the MSM's coverage of the Southern California wildfires.

From dramatic cell phone camera images of flames as they choked off neighborhood escape routes to chilling online narratives of evacuation, citizen journalists covering the wildfires in California this week gave new meaning to the concept of reporting a natural disaster from the ground up.

"I'm not knocking what we do in the mainstream media, but citizens are bringing the highly personal, close-up nature of these fires home to viewers in a way that traditional reporting just doesn't do," said Nancy Lane, senior vice president/editorial at CNN.

"The advantages of having an army of citizen journalists on a story like this is obvious," said Jay Rosen, a New York University media professor and author of the pressthink blog. "This is a story happening in many places and shifting so suddenly that not only can't you be everywhere, you can't even be in most places with your traditional reporter. But with an army of citizen journalists, it's another story altogether.

"This is not some blogger's vision of the future," he said. "It's what people are doing right now to report events that matter in their lives."