me•dia

January 9, 2007

Cell-phone Videos and Citizen News

Filed under: Citizen Journalism, The Changing News — crain @ 2:20 pm

As video capabilities on cell-phones become more ubiquitous, the essense of the news is changing. Quality is going up, price is going down. What does is mean once anyone can record high-quality video essentially undercover? Joe Blow meets James Bond and we’ll never see Seinfeld the same again.

Michael Richards in a West Hollywood comedy club and the authorities in Iraq who executed
Saddam Hussein painfully learned that the prying eyes of television news can belong to anyone who carries a cell phone.

Saddam’s execution and Richards’ flameout illustrate the growing power of cell-phone video as a news tool, not only to supplement stories but to change them.

“It brought to a fore the sense that wow, this is a ubiquitous technology,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News vice president for digital media. “Cameras are now in places where cameras never used to be. That’s transformational.”

From AP on Yahoo News

1 Comment »

  1. Democratic news…now that’s a novel idea.

    Comment by Toby — January 10, 2007 @ 6:47 pm


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