OJR: The Online Journalism Review

VA Tech shooting and grassroots Web journalism

Today's tragic shooting of at least 32 Virginia Tech students has spawned an instant outpouring of citizen journalism coverage on the Web.

Submitted by Noah Barron

Posted: 2007-04-16

The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that Virginia Tech's student-run newspaper blog site, The Collegiate Times had updates of the shootings as they were happening:

"Shots were fired on campus in West Ambler Johnson Hall in the early morning hours."

That chilling entry appeared at 9:47 a.m. Monday on the blog of the Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech University's student-run newspaper. As the day wore on and the death toll climbed into double digits, America's worst campus massacre also was its most immediate.

Full Star-Ledger article here.

CNN and the BBC's news site have both created user-post applications to allow eyewitnesses to upload photos, video and text about the shootings. The footage making the rounds on the network television stations of law enforcement taking tactical position comes from a student who recorded it on a cell phone. (Available here.)

An eyewitness calling him or herself "and1heartache" even created a Flickr slideshow of photos taken at the scene.

On Facebook.com, a flurry of new groups were created today with names like "Ags praying for Virginia Tech," "ASU has Va Tech's back" and "Atlanta holds VA Tech in our hearts," an outpouring of support from schools who had been good-natured sports rivals just a day ago.

This afternoon's press conference with VA Tech President Charles W. Steger and the Blacksburg chief of police yielded little new information, so the Web represents access to information from people who were actually there. College campuses like VA Tech are filled with people who are wired and Web savvy and so the information is arriving on online rapidly and without a media middleman.

In tragedies such as this one, information is scarce and time is of the essence. The London Underground bombings proved to be a sea-change moment in grassroots journalism, where the photos and video taken at the scene by grassroots journalists were as compelling as the news coverage offered by their mainstream counterparts. Will today's events, what and1heartache is calling "41607" prove to be a historic date in the evolution of DIY Web journalism?

Developing....

OJR's Kim Pearson contributed to this report.

Responses:

From Kim Pearson on April 16, 2007 at 6:17 PM

Marianne Richmond at BlogHer supplied some useful pointers. One is to Tom Markiewicz, who is twittering from Blacksburg. His Twitter page has a link to the student-run Planet Blacksburg site. And following his profile link takes you to a blog post he wrote about a shooting on the Va. Tech campus at the beginning of the school year.

On campus, Technorati has focused much of the world's attention on a livejournaling student named Bryce, who really isn't thrilled with all of the attention.

From Noah Barron on April 16, 2007 at 9:25 PM

OJR member Mac Slocum expressed concern about the dangers of rewarding cit journalists for putting themselves in harm's way.

Slocum writes, in reference to footage of a cit journalist approaching armed law enforcement while shooting video on a cell phone, this comment:

I'm sure hard-core citizen journalism advocates will have plenty of excuses for this type of behavior -- "it's an isolated incident," "he has every right to cover the event," "no one told him to do this" -- but I have a huge issue with bystanders darting into a gun battle so they can capture shaky video on a cell phone. Hell, I have a huge issue with reporters doing this type of thing.

Read his OJR thread here and his longer blog post at The Independent Publisher.

UPDATE: Thoughts about Geraldo's spur-of-the-moment use of Facebook?