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How witnesses write the news

New York: Moments after the terrorist attacks on Mumbai began last week, Twitter exploded with messages. Prasad Naik, aka krazyfrog, tweeted: “Firing happening at the Oberoi hotel where my sister works.” Next, he reported that she had called and was safe. Then: “What the ****! I just heard a loud blast! What the **** is happening in Mumbai?” He was near a taxi blast in suburban Vile Parle. Nine hours later, his sister was home and he tweeted: “She saw piles of bodies. The Oberoi hotel guests. Staff members from her own department. All dead. Right in front of her eyes.”

The witnesses are taking over the news. That will fundamentally change our experience of news, the role of witnesses and participants, the role of journalists and news organisations, and the impact reporting has on events. Mumbai — like the Sichuan earthquake — brought reports from witnesses via Twitter and blogs. Both then appeared on traditional media as online witnesses were quoted and interviewed. The novelist Amit Varma wrote of surviving the attack in a nearby hotel and because of that spoke on CNN. Photos from the scene filled Flickr and showed up on newspaper sites and TV screens.

On all these services, people nearby and then worldwide — not witnesses — had an urgent need to share what they knew. So on Flickr we also saw screenshots from TV screens, and on Twitter we heard repeated news. There was a need to organise all this disorderly information. Wikipedia’s users did a remarkable job of updating its snapshot of current knowledge. Google Maps users annotated the geography of the story. The citizen-powered news sites GroundReport, Global Voices and NowPublic also gathered reports. All this created the need to pursue rumours. The blogging journalism teacher Amy Gahran tried to track down unverified reports that the Indian government had asked tweeters to stop reporting from the scene so as not to inform the terrorists.

These are all journalistic functions — reporting, gathering, organising, verifying — that anyone can now take on. Traditional news organisations will still perform these tasks, but in new ways. NYTimes.com posted a front-page notice asking witnesses in Mumbai to send reports. The Guardian, CNN, and other sites instead curated what was popping up on Twitter, Flickr and elsewhere.

At the next huge event, we may see the next step in this evolution of news: witnesses will not only use their phones to broadcast live video. I have spoken with engineers at a phone manufacturer working on software to enable assignments to be sent to people at the scene: imagine being able to find who is near a news event, collecting their perspectives, even quizzing them from afar. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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How witnesses write the news

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