Mumbai and citizen journalism

As the somewhat dramatic account (above) tells you, it was citizen journalists and not mainstream media that broke the story and published the first images and comments from the terror unfolding in Mumbai this weekend.

This story from TechCrunch provides good insight to the first few hours of the reporting of the attacks. Bloggers and social media sites like Flickr and Twitter broke the story and provided the foundation for mainstream media coverage. Several local Indian news channels were reported to have carried a live feed to Twitter updates on the attacks. (Twitter is a micro-blogging service where people can send short messages of up to 140 characters to friends using text messages or over the internet.)

This comment from The Daily Telegraph, written by Demotix, a citizen journalism press agency, is arguing the Mumbai attacks were another defining moment for citizen journalism. Now, Demotix would hope this to be the case as this is the business they`re in, but I still think it is a good argument. There certainly was a lot of citizen journalism going on in Mumbai. But for all the good citizen journalism it wasn`t all good, as this Telegraph-reader commented:

"Browsing Twitter in the hours after the attack, it was striking how little reliable, eye-witness information was about. Most of the Tweets were taken from mainstream media reports, and many of the rest were gibberish, repetitive or unhelpful. There were a handful of Mumbai-based Twitterers posting good stuff but they were drowned out by the chatter. It's a problem that I've experienced with the site before - the difficulty of separating those who are really in the know from those who just want their say."

Another interesting by-story is The Times reporting that Indian police asked Twitter-users to stop updating the site for security reasons as it was assumed the terrorists gained strategic information through the updates.