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July 14, 2005

I Am A Citizen Journalist

A New York City building collapsed this morning, injuring several people

I am in New York this week for several meetings. This morning we were finishing breakfast at a restaurant on the upper west side when we heard sirens and saw fire engines rushing by. A few blocks away, a building had collapsed. Apparently it was being carefully demolished anyway but then lost structural integrity and came crashing down unexpectedly. I was there shortly after it happened and snapped the following pics with my camera phone and posted them to my channel on Rabble. (I also added my reporter-style commentary. If you have Rabble on your phone, just search for “building collapse” or browse the recent posts in the New York area.)

NYPD Canine Team on site to search for buried people
Hundreds of people looking at an empty spot where a building used to be
Police rope off the area around the collapsed building

Of the many opportunities that only LMNOs can capitalize on, my personal favorite is citizen journalism. We built our platform to be the hub powering a suite of applications all based on the same basic construct – that user-generated content and distribution via a series of overlapping personal networks is the future of media. There are literally hundreds of applications that fit this paradigm, but citizen journalism is one of the most important.

Turning Point: London
We will look back at the London Bombings as the turning point at which mainstream media realized the value of user-generated content. We all saw the video of the evacuation from the tube caught by an ordinary person with a camera phone. We also saw the story in the New York Times that featured an amateur photograph. The BBC in London was quick to respond to the story of the disaster and secured the rights to as much amateur coverage as they could. That picture in the New York Times came from the BBC, not Reuters or AP. But it could have, if Reuters or AP had a network of citizen journalists with camera phones. These are the companies that have to build the last mile of their networks into the pockets of ordinary people if they are to compete in a media future that distributes information through fewer links on the value chain with decreasing friction and time.

In the near term, the opportunity is for the incumbent news media companies to embrace citizen journalism by attaching themselves to the technology that is bridging the gap between what is essentially millions of mobile freelance stringers and their front door.

That having been said, this morning was a reminder to me that we are about to see a revolution across all media which gives ordinary people like you and me the greatest opportunity ever to affect significant change to the existing media infrastructure. In the past twenty years, technology has been pushing media production farther to the edge of the network. Desktop publishing, at the time, was a major step forward toward putting previously expensive production services into the hands of anyone with a computer and a laser printer. Then point-and-click website production tools fueled explosive growth of the web. Recently blogging has challenged many incumbent media industries like journalism and PR and has fundamentally altered the way businesses have to communicate with their customers and other interested stakeholders.

This change is good. More and more power is being shifted to the edge of the network where consumers have the tools to build an audience and exert influence like never before. Communication in general is being routed through fewer links on the value chain and as a result is becoming more raw, more pure and more personal. The farthest edge of the network in the media world is into the pocket of the mobile citizen who know has the equivalent of a broadcast network in their pocket. And that mobile citizen is connected to every other mobile citizen through the wireless networks and a series of overlapping personal networks based on friendship, affinity or even just a keyword.

Think about that – I was here in New York and captured a moment that may have been interesting to some other people in New York or around the world. The other people who saw it were able to connect to me directly. I got a few messages from other Rabblers asking me about various details, and I engaged in a short SMS dialog with them, creating an interactive story for all of us and a flash community around the concept of the building collapse. In this way, Rabble is the glue that connects these mobile citizens by giving us a marketplace to transact our content.

Now think about this: This morning a half dozen people and I totally bypassed the newsvan, the cameraman, the reporter, the satellite uplink, the broadcast studio personnel, the news anchor on the air, the cable infrastructure, the television, the set-top box and the TiVo. What we used instead were camera phones, MMS, SMS, wireless data and the infrastructure of the wireless network operators which we payed for by the minute for the privelege of using to transact our media with the community.

The opportunity in the longer term belongs to the network operator. By providing the handsets, applications and networks for this user-generated content to flow between their users, they become the new distribution giants for a new kind of media that will put the cable industry and media incumbents on the ropes.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at July 14, 2005 11:12 AM

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Posted by: Citizen Paparazzi at November 23, 2005 04:56 AM

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