November 28th, 2008
Social Media & Citizen Journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai Terror Attacks: A Case Study
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Introduction
Late on November 26, 2008, India was shaken by a series of terrorist attacks across ten prominent locations in Mumbai, India’s cultural and financial capital (Wikipedia).
The ten terrorists, linked to Islamic terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, managed to hold Mumbai hostage for more than 60 hours and killed 171 people, including several foreign nationals.
Citizen journalism played an important role in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack and several observers, both in the mainstream media and the tech blogosphere, have written about it from many perspectives.
The story has been framed in several ways — “participatory media vs. legacy media”, “Twitter vs. blogs”, and even “Indian internet users vs. American internet users”. As someone who tracks social media and citizen journalism in India very closely, I thought that it may be worthwhile to write a long article length post and separate the myths from the reality.
I’ll divide the case study into four sections —
- Section 1: What was the role of citizen journalism in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?
1.1 The role of blogging, photo-blogging and video-blogging in citizen journalism during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
1.2 The role of Twitter in citizen journalism during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
1.3 The role of dedicated citizen journalism websites during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
1.4 Reactions to the Indian news media’s coverage of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
1.5 Reactions to the international news media’s coverage of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
1.6 The role of citizen journalism in the aftermath of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
- Section 2: What lessons can we learn from citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?
2.1 The importance of mobile applications in crisis reporting.
2.2 The interdependence of legacy news media and participatory news media.
2.3 The scarcity of “real” news in participatory media in crisis reporting.
2.4 The difficulties in extracting meaning from online conversations in real time and the role of curators.
2.5 The problem of recursive rumor loops and the importance of fact checking.
2.6 The dynamics of participatory media critiquing the coverage of legacy news media.
- Section 3: How was it different from earlier instances of citizen journalism in crisis situations in India and elsewhere?
3.1 From mobile 1.0 in the South Asia Tsunami to mobile 2.0 in the Mumbai terror attack.
3.2 From photo-blogging in the 7/7 London tube attack to micro-blogging in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
3.3 Citizen journalism in a distributed crisis situation (China earthquake) versus a concentrated crisis situation (Mumbai terror attack).
3.4 Extracting meaning from citizen journalism on a structured platform (Ushahidi in the Kenyan post election violence) versus an unstructured open platform (Twitter in the Mumbai terror attack).
3.5 Citizen journalism to mobilize a snap mob (in the Greece riots) versus a silent movement (in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack).
- Section 4: What does it mean for the future of citizen journalism and crisis reporting in India and elsewhere?
4.1 The prominence of new media curators in legacy news organizations.
4.2 Citizen journalism platforms that are designed to extract aggregated meaning from distributed reporting.
4.3 Ubiquitous use of tools that extract meaning from user generated content in real time.
Section 1: What was the role of citizen journalism in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?
1.1 The role of blogging, photo-blogging and video-blogging in citizen journalism during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
The citizen journalism narrative during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack was not about bloggers going out into the disturbed areas with their camera phones, shooting photos and videos of the live action, then uploading it to their blogs or social networks, and writing in-depth commentary to accompany it.
The only exception to that broad statement is 20-something Vinukumar Ranganathan (or Vinu) who stepped out into the night with his camera and uploaded some of the first photographs of the Mumbai terror attack (112 of them!) to photo-sharing website Flickr, before proceeding to tweet about them.
Vinu’s photos were quickly picked up by all the major news organizations, including CNN, and his Flickr photo set had received more than 78,000 pageviews by the end of day 2.
Apart from Vinu, the only original first-hand accounts of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attacks came from the writer-blogger trio of Amit Varma, Sonia Faleiro and Rahul Bhatia, who were stranded along with their partners in the Gordon House Hotel, a stone’s throw away from the Taj Mahal Hotel, the center of the terror attack. The three well-written posts are surreal, when read together, because it’s almost impossible to imagine that they were written by three people who shared the same experience. Amit, whose first novel is coming out in a few months, later appeared on the Larry King Live show and BBC, amongst others –
Finally, early on the 11/27 morning, South Mumbai youngster Arun Shanbag woke up oblivious of the previous night’s mayhem, then stepped out with his camera and started live-blogging the Mumbai terrorist attacks with original pictures.
Apart from these three exceptions, I haven’t seen any examples of serious “journalistic” user generated content in the context of the Mumbai terror attacks.
As I said in my interview with Journalism.co.uk, I am a little surprised that there’s is so little journalistic user generated content around the terror attack. In fact, I spent the entire night on 11/27 going through Flickr and YouTube, but there were few original photos on Flickr and only television recordings on YouTube, not a single user-generated video. I would have expected at least a few others to venture out and shoot photos or videos. That happened only when we moved into 11/28.
In fact, very few Indian bloggers were blogging about the terror attacks on 11/26, apart from Manish Viz at Ultrabrown, Arzan Sam Wadia at Mumbai Metblogs, Neha Vishwanathan at Global Voices and Peter Griffin at MumbaiHelp. Only in the early hours of 11/27, the other live-bloggers showed up and Indian link-blogging websites like DesiPundit and BlogBharti were strangely silent on the Mumbai terrorist attacks till early morning.
Even on 11/28, when many Indian bloggers were live-blogging the Mumbai terror attacks — and DesiPundit, Global Voices and myself were working hard to highlight good posts — I saw few first-hand accounts or photographs, and no user generated videos. Most live-bloggers were merely posting news and (often premature) opinion based on the mainstream media news coverage.
There’s value in reposting news, and there’s a good time to offer opinion, but I think that the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack was a time for first-hand original reporting, and the Indian blogosphere didn’t quite rise to the task.
1.2 The role of Twitter in citizen journalism during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
On the other hand, micro-blogging service Twitter quickly became the best source for real time (citizen) news on the Mumbai terror attack, and the hashtag #Mumbai quickly rose up in Twitter trending topics. But the search volume for #Mumbai quickly became too high to handle, so some people first shifted to geo-tagged tweets from people living close to Mumbai, and then to such tweets containing links.
As the Twitscoop graphs below (screenshot taken at 12:18 pm India time 11/28) show, the volume of tweets related to the Mumbai suddenly jumped to as high as 1000 per hour.
Not only that, most of these tweets were from Indians as the volume dramatically came down during the night.
The first photos of the Mumbai terrorist attacks went up on CNN-IBN and NDTV and both CNN-IBN and NDTV quickly started streaming live video feeds of the unfolding situation.
India has more than 30 television news channels and all of covered the crisis comprehensively (perhaps too comprehensively). So, it’s safe to say that most people in India were undoubtedly getting their news on the crisis from television, especially since less than 5% of Indians have access to the internet.
However, as I said in my interview with Daily Telegram, in the first six hours of the crisis, none of the international news channels were covering the Mumbai terror attack in any meaningful way the news was often updated on Twitter (much) faster than on international news websites.
In fact, as I said in my interview on LiveMint, Twitter quickly become the de facto source for on-ground intelligence for mainstream media, and the few citizen journalists on-site in Mumbai become in-demand pundits overnight.
In the early hours of 11/27, human powered search engine Mahalo and citizen journalism website NowPublic became the first comprehensive sources of (mainstream + citizen) news on the Mumbai terror attack and, by the morning of 11/27, Wikipedia had emerged as the definitive source on the emerging situation.
In the early hours of 11/27, Xeni Zardin at Boing Boing and Noah Shachtman on Wired also did roundups of citizen journalism coverage of the Mumbai terrorist attacks (the only ones at that point, I think, apart from my own).
By the morning of 11/27, both tech blogs and the mainstream media were talking about the role of Twitter in citizen journalism in the Mumbai terror attacks, and the discussion intensified during the day.
By the afternoon of 11/27, all the newspapers and TV channels were interested in the story on the role of social media in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.
Twitter, however, was not interested and posted a two sentence official post on the Mumbai terror attack.
1.3 The role of dedicated citizen journalism websites during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
1.4 Reactions to the Indian news media’s coverage of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
1.5 Reactions to the international news media’s coverage of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
1.6 The role of citizen journalism in the aftermath of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack.
Section 2: What lessons can we learn from citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?
Section 3: How was it different from earlier instances of citizen journalism in crisis situations in India and elsewhere?
Section 4: What does it mean for the future of citizen journalism in India and elsewhere?
To be continued…
Very True. Most of the updates that I saw were also from people nowhere close to mumbai
but spreading information(true or false) as if its first hand.
There’s a lot of noise in the information generated from citizen journalism
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I agree, so much RTing was happening on Twitter that I just logged off it and followed the whole blasts on \mainstream\ media
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You echoed my thoughts Gaurav. But neverthless I guess the reality of the situation is that only a few bloggers will write about the live situation, while there would be a collaborative and aggregating reaction by others.
# mumbai is the largest followed/read/talked about topic in twitter and that says a lot about the concerns of Indian netizens on this situation. But overall- I agree with you- we could have done with a few more serious bloggers on this issue.
I am trying to contribute in a small way on http://www.atomthought.com
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Not saying this applies here or not, but I think it might be worthwhile to put together a “citizen journalist’s toolkit” if there isn’t one already, so that someone who is breaking a story will know what tools to use for it.
In fact if there isn’t one, then maybe we can put together one and organize it after the semester ends?
[Reply]
[...] Blog analyzes the role of social media and citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attacks and opines: [...]
Great post with some nice links!
And yes…Sonia Faleiro link is pointing to the wrong post. I guess the link is:
http://soniafaleiro.blogspot.com/2008/11/children-of-bombay.html
[Reply]
[...] Case study [...]
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onSocial Media & Citizen Journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai Terror …Here’s a quick excerpt[Reply]. Global Voices Online » India: Lack of Original Citizen Media Reporting. November 28th, 2008 at 5:26 am. […] Blog analyzes the role of social media and citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attacks and opines: […] … [...]
[...] in the Mumbai terror attacks, I’m trying to make sense of what happened elsewhere. See a work-in-progress case study and my interviews on the role of citizen journalism in the terror attacks with CBS News, DNA, [...]
[...] Social Media & Citizen Journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai Terror Attacks: A Case Study gauravonomics wrote “Over the last day and a half, I have been following the story on the critical role played by citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attacks. Mainstream media and the tech blogosphere have also been following the story actively. The story has been framed in several ways — “new media vs. mainstream media”, “Twitter vs. blogs”, and…” [...]
[...] been tracking the role of citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack in a timeline, a work-in-progress case study and a Flickr set of [...]
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[...] in the Mumbai terror attack on this post, I’m trying to make sense of what happened in a work-in-progress case study and a Flickr set of screenshot on the role of social media in the Mumbai terror [...]
One of the things we have to learn after these dramatical attacks is that international terrorism has made another step to professionalism. Unfortunately, we will have to learn to live with these attacks..
http://www.ginovandewalle.com/terrorism-part-ii/
[Reply]
[...] infrastructure and digital literate people in Mumbai, Gaurav Mishra suggests that there was really surprisingly little original reporting from citizens. Perhaps that’s the next [...]
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Hi Gaurav. Thanks for sharing. You have fantastic coverage here. I have been going through your site for a while now and really appreciate the excellent posts. I have a blog covering the very best views and news on terrorism in India at http://www.IndiaAwakening.com. The goal is influence positive change in India on all fronts. I will be adding to it daily. Hope you can take a look. Let me know if you have any feedback.
[Reply]
[...] We have seen in recent past that Twitter has been effective in both China and India for crisis reporting — first in the China earthquake and then in the Mumbai terror attack. [...]
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[...] a single post. Thanks for visiting!Greory Lent and I don’t always agree and the subject of citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack has always been a source of disagreement between us. If tweets could trample, my god. People proud [...]
[...] All four services — SMSGupShup, Twitter, Vakow and Google SMS Channel — show a rising trend. SMSGupShup is far ahead of the others, Twitter is second and Vakow and Google SMS Channel are still to become popular. It’s interesting to note that Twitter overtook SMSGupShup in serach volumes during November, due to the interest in the #mumbai Twitterstream for the 11/26 Mumbai terror attck. [...]
[...] Abbey at Poynter compares the Gaza social media coverage to the social media coverage during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack – I’m intrigued by the contrast in Twitter/blog coverage between the current Gaza [...]