Today was CNN talking a lot about the movie that was taking of Saddam Hussein hanging. The subject of the discussion is not so much the ethical part (it is not a happy ending). Instead the focus was the citizen journalism. Professional journalists at CNN are using the same mobile phones as citizen journalist.
“There are conflicting reports on who smuggled a cell phone into the execution chamber. Sami al-Askari, an aide to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, attended the execution and told CNN it was one of the four masked guards who recorded the hanging.” CNN (video etc)
CNN also interview the CEO of Scoopt.com a company that are buying “consumer taking photos and films.” I think it is an interesting trend of companies growing bee twin consumers and companies and filing the big gap with new business. Did blog about the evolution of journalism before, now it is this not happy ending of Saddam making it coming a life (as it did with Rodney King).
It is nearly scary how close the Scoopt.com are to one idea in my ONE book about making a special digital camera for citizen journalist I did say it should be bee twin Sony and CNN it is now with Sony Ericsson and Scoopt, take a “shot” at it here (and blog).
Here is the related part from my ONE book:
Today, CNN has over a billion viewers. How can the company apply ONE to bring these people into the company? One way is to deepen its relationship with them. Another is to create new relationships among these people. Let’s say CNN makes an agreement with Sony to market a CNN Digital News Camera that sends images directly to a website. People document their own lives and the lives of their friends and neighbors. To allow these people to interact, CNN would create a ONEcnn.com with free homepages for everyone who had purchased a starter kit. This site would not only supply news from country to country, but also from community to community, family to family, and even individual to individual. This news would in no way compete with existing news coverage, but rather complement it just as the local press does today. Over the years, we have seen the power of the small community newspaper as a marketing medium. In addition to starter fees for the web service and the profit on the cameras themselves, somewhere along the line, these 1 billion people will turn into consumers, with CNN first in line to turn their needs into revenue. CNN already uses much journalistic material from viewers who happened to be on the spot when news broke. With a billion relationships, there will be far more on-the-spot reporters. A stronger relationship between sender and receiver would be created when the two are ONE.
Picture being ONE-line live with 1 billion people where you choose the camera or the film. “Honey, could you give me the remote control so I can change camera angles?”
How can ONE improve the credibility of CNN or even Fox? And why are there now so few positive news stories that don’t feature stupid pet tricks? What would you do with 1 billion customers? Is traditional TV news still the fastest medium? Or are blogs and the Internet faster? Do you see how they can work together?
A related post on this blog: Who sits in front and steers? Who sits in back at CNN?
When the international controversy over the handling of Saddam Hussein’s execution dies down one important lesson will remain the mobile phone camera means no major event can go unrecorded and the Internet ensures even footage from a death cell in Iraq can be available globally and staggeringly quickly. Last years London bombings and the Buncefield oil depot and Lewes firework factory explosions had already shown how amateur video and mobile phone pictures play an important part in the coverage of big breaking news stories, but the Saddam shots strikingly underline how the technology has put the tools of journalism into everyones pocket. American journalist Dan Farber sums it up this way, While the U.S. was chasing after Saddam Hussein’s phantom weapons of mass destruction, the camera-enabled cell phone was beginning its journey from novelty to omnipresent recorder of history, with the Internet as its near instantaneous transport mechanism. Farber, like others involved in Citizen Journalism, was not surprised the grainy phone footage of the execution was soon on the net and on his own site he predicts, In the next few years billions of people will have phones with high resolution still and video cameras, GPS, geotagging, Bluetooth and plenty of network bandwidth and storage to document any point in time. Later this month a one-day conference in Birmingham will create the chance for the news industry, academics and citizen journalists to examine the issues raised as this kind of activity moves closer to mainstream newsgathering. Speakers will include Michael Hill, the newly appointed Head of Multimedia at Trinity Mirror, Vicky Taylor , head of interactivity at the BBC and Tom Reynolds, the blogger behind Random Acts of Reality. The event takes place at UCE Birminghams Screen Media Lab in Lower Eastside, Birmingham on Friday January 26th. If this interests you take a look at the conference details on http://www.mediaskills.org.uk