At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’m going to replay the tune I’ve been playing all weekend, this time in a Facebook note. If you aren’t already, you should be following the Iran election news on Twitter, by going to search.twitter.com, and looking up #iranelection. There, you will find the record of what may or may not be another Iranian revolution; but it is without a doubt the key record of the events proceeding there.
If you’re already on Twitter, I would strongly suggest that you follow:
@persiankiwi : trusted source in Tehran
@Elizrael : young Israeli woman acting as a news aggregator
@BBC_HaveYourSay : the BBC program, er, programme’s Twitter presence.
#iranelection : by informal agreement, news on Twitter regarding the Iranian election includes this “hashtag” to keep everyone on the same page. The volume of communication on this channel is staggering.
@BBC_HaveYourSay is especially relevant to the discussions that most of us have had about the shifting roles of news organizations now that blogs and social networks have taken on the burden of close-to-the-ground news reporting. The central issue here is one of credibility. If it’s out there, you’ll hear it on #iranelection before you hear it through any major news source, but there’s also a lot of noise. Without the journalistic credibility conferred by conventional news sources — say, by a paper of record — whose word do you trust? But when major news organizations are either unable or unwilling to report the full story (most notably in this instance, CNN), what happens to that credibility? I think the BBC is close to an answer. After having their videotapes confiscated, and being told less than tactfully to stop reporting on what they were seeing, they have stepped into the credibility gap, and are vetting sources from the lively horizontal social network of Twitter, and feeding trusted content into their vertical news organization. My sense is that, in a time when vertical news organizations can’t pay enough beat reporters, but when news over social networks lacks an authentication mechanism, this is the way the future of news gathering will work.
It’s a similar situation to what we’ve seen in regard to the NY Post’s poaching of stories from NYC neighborhood bloggers — stories that they read about on the blogs, rewrote, and called “exclusives.” (See, for example, http://www.newyorkshitty.com/?p=18953.) The line from the bloggers has been, ‘We know you can’t do close-to-the-ground reporting like you used to. Stop looking down your noses at us, let us fill that role, and give us credit for it.’ So far, the Post, at least, has been less than forthcoming. Crippled in its ability to provide conventional local reportage in a much hotter political crucible, the BBC is actively revising its role to aggregate, filter, and credit news that it receives from horizontal social networks, and to broadcast that news in its authoritative voice to the world at large.
This is the evolution of networked news in action. It’s a story you’ve got to follow.
Thanks for reading.
- Adam (@feedmeshow on Twitter)
(reposted from my Facebook page)
