Virginia Tech: Citizen journalists seize the day

On Monday, at Virginia Tech University, citizen journalism came of age. By the time America's mainstream media - delayed by an old-fashioned combination of bad weather and surprise - arrived at the edges of the campus, scores of amateur reporters were already using the very modern tools of Web 2.0 to communicate the story from the inside.

Blog entries gave eyewitness accounts, the most up-to-date information and messages of reassurance. A fragment of film footage shot by student Jamal Albarghouti using a mobile phone was already well on its way to becoming the event's iconic media memory.

Twitter - the fastest global conversation ever - finally found a purpose beyond the hyper-trivial, and photographs from dorm windows were being pooled on the photo-sharing website, Flickr. Before the police were even sure the area was safe, the first draft of history - a Wikipedia entry, complete with quasi-academic notes and references - had been written and published.

Not too long ago, news blogs were under attack for leaching from - even plagiarising - traditional media. Yesterday, with few effective alternatives, the BBC's News 24 turned to students' LiveJournal pages for information, and journalists from all over the world, desperate for information, harassed Virginia Tech's student bloggers. Typically, the reporter would offer brief condolences before urging the student to call the newsdesk.

Some bloggers became, understandably, given the bloody and frightening circumstances, very angry, and battle lines were drawn between old and new media. CNN, of all the news networks, did the best job of leveraging citizen talent by effectively handing the job over. They hosted Jamal Albarghouti's mobile phone video and won the trust of some informed students.

Yesterday's events were a little media revolution waiting to happen, and the seeds can be found in 9/11. When America's mobile phone networks crashed, the tech-savvy minority - the earliest bloggers - provided the world with an alternative window on events. Five years later, every student is web-savvy and opinionated, the tools to capture video and photographs are pocket-sized and ubiquitous, and online blogs and social networks are commonplace media. One of the first images to come out of Virginia Tech yesterday was a mobile phone photo of students taking cover in their classroom.

When FaceBook - an online network for students - became the place to check on missing friends and relatives at Virginia Tech, it wasn't a failure on the part of the local authorities, it was just the obvious choice.

Inevitably, there are problems. Bloggers don't have editors; and so nuggets of information are often hidden in inaccurate, infuriating and illiterate word-silt.

The speed and convenience of the web is a recipe for mischief, too. Minutes after the shootings, distasteful domain names (hokiemassacre.com, anyone?) had been registered; hours later they were for sale on eBay.

But maybe the real importance of these Web 2.0 tools lies in how they've got under the skin of a generation. Here was a community of teenagers whose natural reaction during a traumatic event was, remarkably, to photograph, film and write essays. ·