Gauravonomics Blog

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(Even) I’m getting a little tired of reading newspaper articles and blog posts on how Twitter was the first source of news alert on the US Airways flight 1549 crash-landing in New York’s Hudson river (see Twitter, Twitpic, Wikipedia, Venture Beat, Silicon Alley Insider, BBC dot.life Blog, The Guardian, WSJ Digits, WebProNews, CNet).

Let’s get used to it. From this moment onwards, every accident worth reporting, anywhere in the world, will be reported first, via SMS, by a bystander who has a mobile phone. In most cases, the first photos or videos of the accident will be taken by a bystander who has a camera phone. If the accident occurs in a developed country, or a metro city in a developing country, the SMS will be sent to a microblogging service like Twitter and the photos and videos will be uploaded to photo- and video-sharing websites like Flickr and YouTube. From this moment onwards, we will do well to expect it to happen, and reserve our surprise for the cases when it doesn’t happen.

On 6 December 2008, after 15-year-old student Alexandros Grigoropoulos died from a gunshot wound inflicted by a policeman, Epaminondas Korkoneas, after an altercation between a police patrol and a small group of youths in Athens, Greece erupted into violent riots that are still going on two weeks later (see Wikipedia, NowPublic, Mahalo, The Boston Globe Big Picture).

The riots have once again shown, just as they did during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack, that legacy media often lags behind participatory media in crisis reporting. Andrew Liam (via Patrick Meier and Howard Rheingold), who was in Athens to attend the Global Forum for Media Development, quotes Greek columnist and TV commentator Pavlos Tsimas –

Thousands of people were in the street protesting the murder of a boy whose name they didn’t know. Established media have not yet reported the event. TV stations came in a little late. The next day the newspapers did not carry words of the event with the exception of some sports papers that carried the story due to late night printing.

However, the Greece riots have also exposed the scary underside of online citizen activism. It’s widely believed that the flash riots were organized largely by young people, using mobile phones and social networks.

Jemima Kiss at The Guardian –

The World Economic Forum has launched a number of new several social media tools and is inviting web users to discuss key issues on the economy, US politics, business ethics and the environment in advance of its annual meeting in Davos-Klosters next month.

WEF will be coordinating discussion on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and an OpenForum wiki, as well as a photo group on Flickr and videos on the WEF website. Press conferences are being broadcast live through Mogulus and Qik.

The forum has also opened a YouTube channel for the second year and will pick… one contributor to attend the forum in person… and cover the event as a citizen reporter, posting coverage on the YouTube Davos channel.

Its great to see events like WEF embrace social media so wholeheartedly. And, yes, I already envy the winner of the YouTube citizen reporter contest.

I was interviewed by Indian weekly Tehelka recently for a story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attack.

Here is the full text of the Tehelka story –

‘Twitter was the fastest and the most updated source of news’

Gaurav Mishra has been tracking citizen journalism on the web as it has evolved over the course of the Mumbai attacks. Here, he answers PARVATI SHARMA’s queries about the role of new media in disseminating information and creating nuanced analyses.

You are quoted in an interview as saying that citizen journalism “has given new voices to mainstream media and gives new options of how to collect news, how to create news and how to disseminate news.” Could you elaborate a bit on this? And what would you say was its most important contribution during the Mumbai attacks?

New media differs from traditional media because it’s distributed, because it doesn’t have any gatekeepers or editors, because anyone can go online and write a tweet or a blog post, or upload pictures or videos. This results in extremely high volume of content, which is variable in quality. However, there are two mechanisms through which good content is highlighted in new media.

Jamillah Knowles from BBC interviewed me last week for a story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Here is the podcast –

– and here is the full text of the story –

Mumbai online and a virtual World Aids Day

Jamillah Knowles 3 Dec 08, 03:57 AM
The podcast is ready and waiting for you! This week we take a look at the online side of the attacks in Mumbai from the shape of data to the aid on the ground. If you would like to follow up and visit the sites you heard in the show, here’s where you can find them:

Gaurav Mishra is the Yahoo fellow in communications technology and intermational values at Georgetown University - he primarily does research on developing countries and talks about the shape of information online during crisis reporting.

Kamla Bhatt is the host and producer of an award winning syndicated online radio show about life, people and ideas. She tells us her online decisions as events unfolded.

Peter Griffin is a journalist, blogger and is part of a global network of people who try their best to organise aid, provide support and help those affected in a crisis.

My blog was mentioned as a source in a Associated Press story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

The story was reproduced in several newspapers including Hindustan Times, Huffington Post, Business Week, Fox News, New York Times and Salon, amongst others.

Here is the full text of the Associated Press story (AP has very graciously waived off the reproduction fees) –

Bloggers provide raw view of Mumbai attacks
By SAM DOLNICK – 1 day ago

NEW DELHI (AP) — When gunmen started spraying Mumbai with bullets and seizing the city’s landmarks, countless people around the globe turned not to the television or the radio for news, but to each other.

Blogs and social networking sites like Twitter and Flickr buzzed with eyewitness accounts from India’s financial capital, providing some of the first photos of the besieged targets and serving as a forum for pleas for updates on friends and family.

Photos posted on Flickr just 90 minutes after the attacks had been viewed at least 110,000 times by Sunday.

Twitter users, who simply tagged their comments “mumbai,” traded information at a rate of 50-100 posts a minute in messages that were sometimes wrong, often fragmented, but always instant.

I was interviewed by Los Angeles Times last week for a story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Here is the full text of the Los Angeles Times story –

Mumbai news fished from Twitter’s rapids
9:45 AM, December 2, 2008

Grenade attack in Colaba market,” read a Twitter message from a user named Abhishek Baxi on Saturday. Then a few minutes later. “Blast outside Oberoi Hotel in South Mumbai.”

Baxi was one of the first Twitter users to post updates about the attacks in Mumbai. But he was far from the last.

The microblogging medium, along with several other new media platforms, saw its first sustained action in an international crisis. As awareness of the attacks spread, the Twitter throughput soared. Once a way for friends to keep each other updated on daily routines, Twitter is now looking more like a legitimate medium for short bits of information. The problem is there’s just way too much of it.

During the attacks, users from around the world posted tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of short notes, updates, musings and links to the latest information on Mumbai — many, if not most, of the facts coming from mainstream news outlets.

I have 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 screenshots.

Hundreds of people — led by Vinukumar Ranganathan, Dina Mehta and Peter Griffin — shared news and other useful information from Mumbai on Twitter, Flickr and their blogs. Several bloggers live-blogged the event while Global Voices and DesiPundit worked hard to highlight the best posts.

However, even as we spent sleepless nights highlighting the most useful information on the Mumbai terror attack, several other people were busy spreading hate through some of the same online tools.

I don’t think of myself as particularly political and, in three years of blogging, I haven’t written even one post that is political in nature. My first tendency is to shy away from participating in emotionally charged political discussions like the ones beginning to dominate the Indian blogosphere now. I’m sure many of you feel the same way.

However, we will be doing ourselves great disservice if we step back and let the loonies take over. The 11/26 Mumbai terror attack is over, but the work of the online community in India is not over.

I was interviews by CBS News yesterday for a story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

A small clip from the interview was shown on The Early Show at CBS News today morning (YouTube)–

Here is the full text of the CBS News story –

Web A Reliable Resource In Mumbai Madness
New Media Allowed The World To Look In On A City In Crisis
NEW YORK, Nov. 28, 2008

(CBS) The reach of the Internet proved a reliable resource when madness took to the streets of Mumbai on Wednesday as new media allowed the world to look in on a city in crisis and receive real-time information from citizen journalists as events were first unfolding.

Before the sights and sounds of the attacks in Mumbai could be televised, cell phones and the Internet were abuzz, both in blogs and with images as the horror unfolded, reports Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.

“What’s important is to get a quick sense of what’s happening,” said social networking expert Gaurav Mishra. “One of the first real photographs of the scene was posted by somebody on Flickr.”

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?