From what I've observed, CNN pushes participants off to the side on their website, burying them in their iReport section. BBC News is much more participatory, including comments, updates from folks, and integrating their content.

This is similar to what I observed during Hurricane Katrina, when CNN would not allow for participants to update their missing persons list. Instead, they used a horrendously clunky listing service, which at first listed the missing using a numerical navigation scheme for paging (1, 2, 3, 4 etc.) instead of alphabetical order. During the London Bombings of 7 July 2005, Flickr was far more active than the activity I have witnessed so far for Mumbai. Though there have been very helpful postings of news program screen captures, especially the still images of the hostages being released. At first, Wikinews was far more active than Wikipedia, where news was constantly being updated. The same occurred during the shootings at Virginia Tech, although Facebook was the center of much activity in the wake of that disaster. I've been working on this topic since 2004, and I've recently published articles tracing the use of social software during times of disaster that may be of interest to those of you working on this topic: Potts, L. (2009, in press). "Using Actor Network Theory to Trace and Improve Multimodal Communication Design." Technical Communication Quarterly. Potts, L. (2009, in press). "Designing for Disaster: Social Software Use in Times of Crisis." International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development. Potts, L. (2008). "Designing with Actor Network Theory: A New Method for Modeling Holistic Experience." Proceedings of the International Professional Communication Conference. Montreal: IEEE. Potts, L. (2008). "Mapping the Social and Technical in the Wake of Disaster." Proceedings of the 2008 Sociotech Interaction Design Workshop. London: British Computing Society. I look forward to hearing from anyone interested in collaborating. Take care, Liza Liza Potts, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Old Dominion University Norfolk, VA 23529 757.683.3997 AIM: LizaPotts / Skype: lkpotts lkpotts@gmail.com / lpotts@odu.edu On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 10:48 AM, Frank Thomas <news.ftr@free.fr> wrote:

And the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel , usually quite positive about digital media (the website is the no 1 on political news in Germany) criticizes the quality of the citizen journalists and writes about digital gawkers who produce commentary about events that they know about from other bloggers, twitters - or the press. The author also shows the extreme rapid reaction of twitters after the attacks in a nice diagram.

Another topic to think about : the need of having eye witnesses and instant explanations in the press:

A Mumbay blogger writes: I was on Larry King Live on CNN about three hours ago. They called me and asked me to be on the show as an eyewitness, at which I protested that I hadn't actually seen anything, I was merely in the vicinity. But they'd read what I wrote in this post earlier, and they wanted me to talk about that. So I agreed, and came on briefly. King asked me if I'd actually seen any terrorists—I felt guilty that I couldn't offer him any dope there.

http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article/a-night-out-in-mumbai/

- ft

Larry Press wrote:

...

The wikipedia page on the Mumbai attacks grew to nearly 5,000 words in 6 sections and was edited over 900 times in 21 hours, see:

http://cis471.blogspot.com/2008/11/mumbai-terrorist-attack-21-hour.html

Citizen journalists also used Twitter and Flickr:

http://cis471.blogspot.com/2008/11/anyone-might-be-reporter-with-twitter.htm...

Larry Press

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