If you sold shares in each video camera where each camera could charge a proportionate fee to subscribers in the event of valuable news, I think you’d find quite a few cameras with very high values.

And a few days ago the share prices of cameras in the Nevada desert would be well above zero – until someone figured out which cameras had interesting footage, and which didn’t.

It’s all moot anyway.

Everyone’s video camera will soon participate in an effective grid over the planet in proportion to interest.

Imagine video phones continuously uploading footage to the local GoogleVideo wifi node. There are plenty of eyeballs and video processing algorithms able to find a few diamonds in the Niagara falls of banality.

And this differs from the legacy press how, exactly? What story is ever static? (aside possibly from the obituary page)

David A.: “I was there, I saw what I saw and told that story. That’s all.”

Hey, don’t put yourself down. That formula worked well enough for Ed Murrow.

David K.: “Nice story, except for that grating “citizen” journal stuff. I’m sure all the people involved – the ‘victims’, the cops, the reporters, the train’s engineer, all the people watching – were citizens of somewhere.”

I’ve known old fogey journalists who would disagree. The kind of guys who refuse to vote, because that would be a conflict of interest.

Liz: “Aw Doc, why the focus on citizen journalism and not the focus — as David point’s out — on the oral history that’s been happening since time began?”

Easy enough: It’s a strange but true fact that most journalism schools come out of the English dept., and not the History dept. This leads to two things:

1) Journalists have never been as rigidly faithful to the facts as historians, pleading the pressures of time.

2) Journalistic writing almost always has a narrative arc, with protagonists, antagonists, etc. It’s why “good news” is hardly ever given any press — it’s considered “boring,” and thus without “news value.” If you think about it, from a strictly objective point of view, that shouldn’t matter. (As David A. succinctly put it above: “I was there, I saw what I saw and told that story. That’s all.”) I’ve always agreed with Neal Stephenson’s piece in Wired a few years back calling for a regularized grid of video cameras all over the planet, randomly playing for about 10 seconds each, to demonstrate the average “news value” of a place is zero.

On our intellectual pursuits we can always find ways to disconnect our heads from our hearts. If any average person was there — say my mom — would you say she was wrong? What if she choose to use the telephone?

David sent word on via email to the Tribune. He never claimed to be a reporter. He’s a person who was there telling others what he saw — aa sny feeling human being might in that circumstance.

People have always told stories of what happened. Isn’t this just what this is. I still applaud him. I say the words again . . . oral history. Do we no longer have room for that?

In the end, the word is still “hope.” I’m still glad to be human.

In this case, though, it wasn’t even an ‘amateur’ (a perfectly good term) journalist – just someone passing by who saw the action. In the past, they would have called the TV/radio station, the newspaper, etc. to report the story. Today, that ‘honor’ evidently went to Twitter. That’s hardly the venue I’d choose to disseminate breaking news, but it would be a good place to put notes in a pinch.

Still, my point is to plead, once again, for the demise of that horrible “citizen journalist” meme….

-dave

Hi Doc – just an aside, but I found that WP 2.2.x sometimes gets confused when you have two BLOCKQUOTE sections closely adjacent to each other – or worse still when they are nested. My blogging got easier (if a little more fiddly) when I switched off the automatic HTML-correction feature, which was actively corrupting my text on occasion, rebalancing my blockquotes the wrong way round, and other stuff like that.

I’m not sure whether this describes the problem, but I hope this helps.
Alec.

I e-mailed the Tribune reporter who reported the news after the events and offered to speak to them. It turns out that one individual pulled the woman out of the car—but when I pulled up there were two of them helping her.

The only thing I think this proves is that in addition to MSM, people will be telling first hand accounts through things like blogs, twitter etc. But we’ve already known that.

This isn’t real journalism and I don’t think anyone would claim it to be (I wouldn’t). It just demonstrates that the average person can tell a story from there perspective. I was there, I saw what I saw and told that story. That’s all.

After they’ve taken care of that, then maybe they can worry about who gets the “scoop”.

The Tribune went on to discuss the impact of this event on train schedules, which impacts more people.

It’s not the sensational stories that are real journalism — anyone can be in any place and capture a ‘hot’ event. It’s the stories that take work, digging, interviews, research and that impact on broad numbers of people that are the true mark of journalism. It’s these types of stories we’re in danger of losing because of the focus on teen age heroes and daring rescues.

re:
“You won’t find any of these details on the story that recently went up on the Chicago Tribune because they are most likely fact checking.”

Well, Armano initially reported 2 kids, then 3 kids in Twitter. His blog post says two kids. WBBM Radio actually got the name of one and then interviewed him on-air, and is going with the story that he is the hero of the event.

Did Armano contact the Tribune or local news outlets to give his account– or did he expect them to be trolling area blogs? There is no tag whatsoever defined for “breaking news.”

I understand the potential power of a super-connected average citizen to get the word out to a mass audience. But the rest of us should do well to learn, and store, the phone numbers (natch, text-message addresses) for local media outlets in our mobile phones.