No matter where you were in the world, you woke up or ended the day in horror watching, what Piers Morgan so aptly described, “Apocalypse Japan.”
Today’s devastating earthquake and resulting tsunami in Japan honed a new reality when it comes to journalism. As have these past couple months of upheaval in the Middle East.
What has become more and more part of the story regarding significant events has been the people on the ground who were there front and center.
In fact, because mainstream media outlets have struggled to adapt to the changing times, and in an effort to try and save their existence, have laid off reporters–especially foreign correspondents, it means the iReporter is more important than ever.
While the downside to our technological world means journalists are out of a job, the iReporters are abundant and ever-ready at any given moment.
If this means a bastardization of journalism, so be it. Get used to it. NBC, ABC, CBC, and others are not spending the dough to hire correspondents in every corner of the globe. We already know, without the citizen journalist, there would be no video or photographs of happenings in Iran, Egypt, Libya…and how glued are we to those personal cell phone or camcorder images taken from Jane or Joe–or Kalle and Sarah on vacation in Phi Phi? There’s nothing like raw footage to let you know exactly what it was like.
