Cameraphones will change the way that news is gathered and reported. But they will also change the kind of news that we see.
On the southern shore of the Golden Horn there is a giant yellow balloon. Tethered in one place, it can hoist a basket of tourists six hundred feet into the air for a panoramic view of Istanbul. It’s only a few years old, but it’s become a minor landmark, a little Istanbul Eye. And it’s managed by the family of Endam, whose wedding Summer and I were in Turkey to attend.
A couple of days after the wedding, there was a minor accident. A freak wind blew the balloon too close to a tree, where one of its ropes got tangled. I am sure it was a very scary experience for those on board, but the balloon was freed quickly and no one was hurt. And that would have been that, were it not for cameraphones and a slow news day.
At least two people - one on the ground and one in the air - had cameraphones capable of shooting a few seconds of video. The short, jerky, low resolution footage that current phones deliver may not be much good for home movies but it’s perfect for TV news. Think Blair Witch Project; if the camera is bouncing around there must be something terrifying just outside the frame, right? That evening at least three network news shows led with the balloon story, running the few seconds of footage over and over, backed by some ominous orchestral music and straplines like ‘Balonda Panik!’
There’s a long tradition of citizen journalism. Amateur footage has played a significant role in the media at least since the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. Then, as on 9/11 or following the Tsunami, amateur video made an important contribution to a major news story. At other times a major news story has been driven entirely by amateur video, such as the beating of Rodney King.
Far more often, however, amateur video has fed TV and now the web’s relentless appetite for soft news: content that is new, scary, funny, new, sexy, dramatic, and new, regardless of whether it is in any sense important. In Istanbul it was ‘panic in the air’, but it could have been man pulled from raging torrent, kid doing pratfalls, or dog chasing hippo. I believe that amateur video makes up a much larger share of soft news than hard news, simply because the pros are not around to record this stuff unless it’s staged for them or it happens at a public event. For every Citizen Woodward, there have been a dozen Citizen Weegees - people smart enough to know farce or drama when they see it, and to turn on their cameras.
Cameraphones will dramatically increase citizen journalism of both kinds. The first significant use of video from a cameraphone by the major media was just six weeks ago, when London was bombed. There weren’t many shots, and the quality was poor. But five years from now, almost everyone will be carrying a phone with them every day that will be capable of shooting several minutes of broadcast-quality video. This will be by default; it’s already getting difficult to buy a phone without a camera built in.
New businesses will emerge to aggregate all this content, tag it, identify what’s most important or interesting, and broker deals with major media companies. Flickr and Scoopt are already doing this for still images.
While most people are thinking about Citizen Woodward and anticipating a pro-am Pulitzer, I am thinking about Citizen Weegee. I believe that cameraphones will generate far more soft news than hard news. There are often people with camcorders at theme parks, sports events, parades, and weddings. It’s much less likely at the scene of a car crash, a burglary, a fire, a street fight, or every single time a celebrity goes out in public. But as I learned in Istanbul, somebody always has a mobile phone.
The problem is that soft news tends to drive out hard news altogether.
Cheap thrills drive out stories about Medicare. Simple images and
soundbites drive out complex, nuanced stories. Meetings where powerful
people make decisions that affect all of our lives don’t get reported
at all, because there’s no funny bit with a cat and a banana.
What
happened to the yellow balloon was news. I don’t believe that it deserved to be headline news, with
saturation coverage, in a country of seventy million people. For me it’s a very early example of how cameraphones will shift the balance of reporting even further away from hard news.
