This week, the expert landing of the Hudson river plane crash was captured by Twitterer (a noun used by the BBC) Janis Krums and uploaded to the social networking site via his mobile phone. His remarkable Twitter picture of the Hudson plane crash instantaneously became an iconic representation of the arrival of social network reporting and raised the profile of Twitter as a global communications network.
Citizen journalism is not a new phenomenon, but what has got the media industry reeling is the fact that traditional reporting media channels were beaten at their own game as they struggled to broadcast the story. Mobile technology combined with social networking consumer behaviour and a newsworthy event has propelled an age of accessible consumer-driven journalism.
The BBC advocates these emerging communication channels and integrated Twitter into its online reporting of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Also, Robert Peston’s BBC blog became a credible source of information for the unfolding ‘credit crunch'. Other media heavyweights can only follow suit and embrace new media channels in order to attain maximum audience reach.
This does raise the question, to what extent are these new channels going to become the norm? Currently, event-based reporting leverages the viral nature of social networking, and the popularity of social networking providers (e.g. Twitter) piggy-back off of this, but will social networking ever take over traditional media channels?
RELATED LINKS:
Cx3 blog entry: 2008-2009 mobile trends
Cx3 blog entry: BBC sports Olympic map Twitters for gold
Cx3 blog entry: iPhone driving growth in mobile internet usage behaviour
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