Citizen Journalists Key in Chronicling Mumbai Terror Attacks

Sreenath Sreenivasan

Were the Mumbai terror attacks a defining moment for citizen journalism?

It certainly seems so. Citizen reporters – or just plain old eyewitnesses - blogged, messaged, Twittered, photographed and generally chronicled the horrific attacks in ways that got the attention of no less than The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes.

Columbia University Journalism Professor Sreenath Sreenivasan, a technology reporter and co-founder of the South Asian Journalists Association, said coverage of the Mumbai attacks represented another step in the evolution of citizen journalism.

“We’ve seen the defining moment of citizen journalism several times,” he said. “Each time the bar was raised, more people participated and the quality just keeps getting better and better as more attention is paid to it. This time it was the story of Twitter.”

Sreenivasan said Twitter “was ideal for the circumstances here, the geography of this place and the way Indians use text messaging. They use it to write short messages packed with information. That’s what you saw here.”

Sreenivasan was himself involved with live broadcasts about Mumbai on Blogtalkradio.com/saja.

“We did 16 hours of programming hosting speakers in Mumbai, people who were on the ground there, reporting in to us,” he said. “I was hosting a show with an author who writes about Mumbai. He was traveling from Washington to India to attend the funeral of his older brother who had been killed. He called us. He wanted to tell the story of his brother. He shared his thoughts at that moment with us on the air, talking in a safe space.”

Of course, citizen journalism isn’t perfect, he added: “As with everything, there are a lot of problems. But citizen journalism is working in concert with mainstream media. It’s not just us vs. them anymore.”

Media consultant Amy Gahran, editor of The Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits weblog, said in Mumbai there was a bit of everything happening.

“In Mumbai, some of it was citizen journalism, some of it was people pulling together references from the mainstream media. Some of it was people on the ground in Mumbai with cellphones saying ‘this just happened.’ It ran the range from very subjective reactions to amplifying or even questioning what was going on in mainstream media.”

For instance, when some broadcast TV outlets began showing movements by Indian troops responding to the crisis, “a lot of people on Twitter were asking why were they showing this? I thought it was very interesting to see that kind of fast reaction,” Gahran said.

But that lightning-fast response also produced rumors, including one on Twitter that the Indian government was asking people to stop using Twitter to convey sensitive information about police and troop activities.

Gahran checked it out and found that the item appeared to be unfounded. “Twitter can be useful to allow news to spread quickly but it can also spread rumors quickly,” Gahran said. “It shows the importance of checking things out.”

In response, Gahran even wrote a blogpost on responsible tweeting that included admonitions to “check the source BEFORE you share info” and “encourage people spreading a rumor to correct or update.”

But generally, Gahran is sanguine about citizen and social media – everything from Facebook to MySpace to Twitter. “Social media proved to be an interesting check on what the broadcast media was doing,” Gahran said. “Hopefully we’ll see more of that.”