You Make The News

This is a real crossover story - relevant to New Media Technologies in Year 12 and Broadcast News in Year 13. You may remember all those great pictures from inside the tube tunnels after the London bombings last July. Obviously they weren't taken by the BBC, Sky or ITN's news crews. They were taken on the video enabled mobile phones of the survivors of the crash. The idea of an ordinary member of the public (citizens) generating such pictures (content) for news programmes is what has become known as the growth of citizen reporters or journalists. They make the experience of watching the news all the more powerful and immediate for the audience and could have a significant impact on the financial resources of broadcasters (who needs to employ all those journalists and camera crews when the public can do their job?). There are, though, signifcant issues to resolve -the two As - accuracy and access. The 3 mobile phone network is trying to resolve the access issue (read the article for more on this) and claim that broadcasters have to do their bit to ensure that the citizen generated content is truthful and accurate (a cornerstone of news reporting).