The Bridge Collapse: Citizen Journalism

Internet marketing guru David Erickson, who owns www.e-strategy.com, has a long and fascinating post on citizen journalism / citizen input about the bridge collapse. Several of David's most compelling conclusions:

Mainstream media still holds citizen journalism at arms length. With the exception of Minnesota Public Radio, almost all of the mainstream media treated citizen journalists as a resource for reporters to tap for their own reports, rather than treating citizens as co-equals who can tell stories themselves.

Citizen Journalists can be surprisingly competent reporters. I was struck by both the volume and the quality of the citizen reports. The eyewitness accounts were compelling with vivid details and more often than not lacked the melodrama to which amateur writing is often suspect. The citizen generated photos and video were equally compelling.

Flavor and Context. The eyewitness blog posts, the on-the-scene photography, and even the handheld and cell phone videos complete with their jerky motion and blurry, overcompressed images, all contribute far better than the mainstream media, to giving you a more accurate sense of being there. The videos, especially because of their amateur look, gave the viewer a powerful sense of the frantic chaos on the ground.