Friday 19 August 2011

A new reporting frontier


TODAY, at the Isle of Thanet Gazette office, I have been preaching to my colleagues the virtue of an application called Bambuser. It has been around for a while but I have only discovered myself just recently.
For those who don't know, Bambuser is an application that allows you to broadcast a live video stream from your computer or mobile device.
I wouldn't say it is completely different from YouTube accept that it is live.
The beauty of this is that I can report live from a scene of a story and have a link to a video posted on my Twitter as soon as I start recording.
I used it for the first time today when I went to report on an accident in Margate (see right column).
If I am honest it wasn't a successful attempt, the camera was shaky and the commentary was non existent- I am after all used to writing the news instead.
However it did get me thinking about the possibilities of such an application.
Bambuser has already achieved fame for being the first website to be banned by governments during the Arab Spring; anybody could record events live, across the world, as they unfolded.
What does this mean for journalists like me? On the face of it, it is a great tool, a way get the news out there to the public as quickly as possible. The only thing is is that anyone can do it, anyone can be a live reporter now.
This might not bode well for the newspaper industry but the only way the newspaper industry and the media as a whole can survive this absolute democratisation of information is to embrace it.
The beauty of a world in which anyone is welcome to produce their own content is that everyone is also free to subscribe to what they like and leave the rest.
I am confident that whatever shape media takes in the future there is still a place for quality journalism as long as journalists, and media organisations they work for, evolve with the times.
Websites like Bambuser prove that as reporting becomes easier, Journalist are going to have to work harder.





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