Citizen Journalists of the World

A Harvard University Medical School professor had never heard of "citizen journalists," but Wednesday he became one when he chanced to be visiting Mumbai. From a terrace in south Mumbai, he used his Twitter feed to describe the gunfire and uploaded photos to his blog. "I felt I had a responsibility to share my view with the outside world," he told the New York Times in an email of course. Twitter, blogs, websites, photo-sharing sites, text messages and cellphones for voice and image are the new tools of the new journalists -- just plain folks who happen to be on the scene. As discussed in class Sunday, technology has added a new dimension to news coverage. The Times article quotes Sree Sreenivasan, a new media expert at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism: "A little bit of information is better than no information at all."