Burma's bloggers show power of citizen journalists in a crisis

Blogged by: Glenda Cooper
The pictures were often grainy and the video shaky, but in media terms, they were gold dust. The bloggers of Burma used new technology to tell the world about last week's protests in their previously closed country. Thanks to them, we saw pictures of monks marching through the streets of Rangoon, and heard crackly phone calls with a chilling soundtrack of gun shots.
Many pointed out the difference technology has made compared with the 1988 uprising, when the junta's bloody suppression was largely hidden from outside view. It's no surprise then that last Friday, the authorities suspended internet links to the outside world and blocked mobile phone lines.
Since then, people inside Burma seem to be getting patchy access to the internet, but there's no doubt that it's a struggle to get their message out. On October 4, bloggers around the world plan a protest in support of their Burmese colleagues. In solidarity, they'll refrain from posting on their blogs, instead putting up only a banner with the words "Free Burma!".
The bloggers and citizen journalists in Burma are only the latest example of how news has been transformed in a very short time by what's known in the jargon as "user generated content" (UGC).
If you think back to the 9/11 attacks in the United States, the dominant images we all remember came from journalists. The BBC received only a few emails in the early stages, and of those, only two could be turned into interviews - by contacting the people involved.
According to Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media, it was the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that marked the turning point - a before-and-after moment for citizen journalism. One blog created just after the disaster, waveofdestruction.org, logged 682,366 unique visitors in just four days.
Many people felt this new kind of coverage was a one-off, or as one commentator described it, down to "lots of rich white westerners in bathing suits". But it wasn't.
The South Asia earthquake of October 2005 showed how wrong some major media groups had been in calling the impact of this new kind of reporting.
Within eight minutes of the quake bringing down Islamabad's Margalla Towers, the BBC's Talking Point portal received an email from someone who'd been next door in Al Mustafa Towers.
The corporation received 3,000 emails on the first day after the quake hit Pakistan, including comments, information, photographs, and messages about those who were missing. At some points, it was receiving news from the ground faster than its journalists - and aid agencies - could get there, especially from the badly affected city of Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

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