Last month, images and stories of the tragic London bombings pervaded television and Internet media around the globe, but remarkably professional journalists and photographers found themselves unable to take credit. July’s London bombings provided one of the first examples of world news documented by unintentional journalists— bystanders and survivors who utilized camera phones and other wireless technology to document their experience.

This was only the latest and most vivid example of the global trend of ‘user generated content’ (UGC) that is beginning to have a radical impact with the news media worldwide. Now that a little time has passed, PoliticsOnline offers this perspective on what happened.

The BBC has been the global leader among news media in developing UGC – first with the Tsunami and now with the bombing – so we have focused a lot of this special report on what happened with the BBC. We are especially proud to have an exclusive by a long time friend of PoliticsOnline, BBC’s Kate Goldberg as she provides her own first-person account of what happened in London on July 7, 2005.
Full Disclosure: PoliticsOnline has been working with the BBC on a number of projects for several years.

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Emily Miller, Editor

Five minutes later my phone went again. It was my husband. "There's been another bomb. A huge explosion outside my window. I just wanted to tell you I'm OK. We're being evacuated now." He spoke quickly, and I could hear shouting in the background. One of his colleagues had seen a roof being blown off a bus.

I rushed home as fast as I could and logged on. The BBC News website was reporting a series of explosions that had been caused by a power surge on London underground. It didn't add up. How could a power surge at the tube station have blown the roof off a bus outside my husband's office window - which is a five minute's walk from the nearest tube? I turned on the radio and the TV. Everyone was reporting the same story. I tried calling my husband again - but the network was down.

For the next hour and a half I was glued to the TV screen, which kept to the same line. For the first time in my life, I sent an email to the BBC News Have Your Say website, telling them my experience. As an interactive editor at the BBC World Service, I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can improve our news coverage by listening to our audience, and tapping into their vast wealth of experience. New technology means they can both record and disseminate the news quicker than any news organization could do on its own.

The London bombs tested this more thoroughly than any news story before. Hundreds of mobile photos showing the immediate aftermath of the bombing were being shared on sites like Flickr. On blogs and online news sites, eyewitnesses were reporting fleeing from the scene of one explosion only to be caught up in another. As I surfed the internet, and continued to watch and listen to the BBC, a picture of huge uncertainty emerged. I'd heard nothing from my husband since our brief phone conversation that morning - and I feared that he could have been caught in another bomb.

While in some ways technology was enabling news to travel at lightening speed - with several mobile videos emerging in the first few hours - it was equally terrifying when it failed. Due to the huge volume of mobile calls being made that day in central London, the networks struggled to cope. For several hours I was unable to contact my husband. As a result, email traffic reportedly doubled. Mail filtering firm MessageLabs said that it was seeing more than one million messages per hour pass across its servers.

Eventually my husband made his way home, tired and shaken. Like most Londoners, he had walked. He told me how his workplace - The British Medical Association - was being used as a mini-hospital and temporary morgue. His medical colleagues were treating the injured and dying. The pavement outside was spattered with body-parts, and the building soaked in blood.

For the second time, I was puzzled at the disjunction between what I was hearing from my husband and the reports of the mainstream media. The BBC - along with other news outlets - were still reporting only two fatalities. "Well, two died inside the BMA alone," John said grimly. It was difficult to estimate the number of dead outside because there were so many body parts, but one doctor thought it was about 13. This later appeared spot on.

Again I emailed Have Your Say, and this time one of the producers called back and interviewed my husband http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/465 9237.stm That day the Have Your Say team received about 20,000 emails, 3,000 SMS messages, 1,000 photos and 20 pieces of amateur video. They also received comments from around the world on the BBC language websites - some of which are translated here - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4663811.stm

An image of the bus with its roof torn away was sent in from a reader's camera phone within the first hour, and was the main picture on the front page for most of the day. It was also used on the BBC's rolling news channel, News 24, as was much of the amateur video.

The London bombs have changed many things in our city. We look at each other uneasily on buses and tubes, eyeing each other's bags. We talk more readily to strangers. We no longer feel comfortable taking our children into central London. And we all clutch our mobile phones. Those of us with camera phones can't fail to have seen the power of those images. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4663561.stm

Kate Goldberg is an editor at BBC World News Service. She and her family, pictured here, live in London.

*Over 1,500 non-professional photos of the London bombings are posted on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/groups/bomb/pool/. Photos were posted on the site even before professional news media got to the scene.

*Wikipedia allows users from all over the world to edit entries on its wiki on various subjects. The entry about the July 7 bombings was edited over 5,000 times in 2 weeks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

*18% (34.5 million) of the 192 million cellphones in the U.S. are camera phones. Camera phones are even more prevalent in Europe because the technology has been around longer and is more integrated.
http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-et-tv8jul08,0,1577992.story

*Where did U.S. readers go for news online on July 7? The top five most-visited sites were Yahoo News, MSNBC, CNN, AOL News, and NYTimes.com. The BBC ranked 11th, but received a 138% increase in traffic from U.S. readers. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050712glaser/

Pete Clifton: View From Inside BBC

While the use of photos and material from citizen bystanders is not a new journalistic concept, openly encouraging this kind of interaction is. Clifton has addressed the issue several times in his online column, explaining the need for this kind of coverage and defending it against critics, who have argued that citizen journalists may actually be citizen paparazzi, or that citizen journalists should be compensated for their contributions. Critics complain that not paying those who send in images is “cheating the very people you purport to serve.” However, this has not been the BBC’s experience: as Clifton reports, most reader contribution has come from people who simply want to share what they saw, with no ulterior, monetary motive.

Clifton argues that citizen journalism facilitates a positive relationship between the media and the public it serves, saying, “The contributions of our readers have not been a sideshow, they have been at the heart of our coverage. It's hardly something to celebrate at a time of such alarm and uncertainty, but there has without question been another step change in the relationship we have with our readers, their comments and pictures.”
Read Clifton’s column:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4727579.stm
Reader Response:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4748483.stm

BBC’s Citizen Journalist Sections

BBC News Online has an entire section dedicated to the July bombings, including an extensive “Your Photos” section and amateur video captured on mobile phones, a tribute to the victims, and blog entries from “Rachel”, a survivor who made daily postings to BBC News Online about her experience.
Pictures:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4660563.stm
Rachel’s Blog:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4670099.stm
Tribute to the Victims:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/london_blasts/victims/default.stm

MSNBC:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8499792/
The Guardian:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2005/07/07/your_eyewitness_accounts.html

Other sites dedicated to the London bombings include:
The London Response Wiki:
http://dowire.org/wiki/London_responds
We’re Not Afraid.com:
http://www.werenotafraid.com/

"It seemed kind of wrong. The BBC and other news Web sites were so overwhelmed it was almost like an alternative source of news. “ --Tim Bradshaw, who posted photos from around London on flickr.com, and said in an e-mail message he was not sure at first whether he would post them.

“We've seen an amazing eruption of citizen journalism stories since we launched Flickr. We have changed the way news is done. What we're seeing is that instant publishing has seeped into traditional journalistic practice.” -- Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr where many posted their London pictures. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/entertainment/article/0,1299,DRMN_6_3924505,00.html

"Media organizations should learn to give away the control. By doing so, they'll actually end up maintaining more control. The ones that embrace this will succeed...the others will go under.”—Rory O’Connor, independent documentary filmmaker and co-founder of the international media firm Globalvision, Inc. O’Connor praised the incorporation of citizen journalists at the first annual Wikimania conference held in Germany in August 2005.
http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/526

“A lot of what's being done by the citizen-journalist will be most useful as people start pulling together the best images and stories," he said. "There was a cliché that journalists write the first draft of history. Now I think these people are writing the first draft of history at some level, and that's an important shift."— Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media and founder of Grassroots Media. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/08/international/europe/08blog.html?ex=1123300800&en=abd5b59fc78f7807&ei=5070&th&emc=th

The idea that the streets are now filled with thousands of potential journalists armed with camera phones can be unsettling—“Imagine Rodney King and Abu Ghraib times a million. Everyone who works, or moves around, in a public place should consider whether they like the idea of all their movements being recorded by nosy neighbors” said Dan Gillmor.

The BBC received feedback from viewers worried about privacy and exploitation of the bombing victims, as well as the effect that citizen journalism has on the standards of established news organizations like the BBC. Comments included: “There is a worrying trend in which requesting and displaying those pictures is becoming an end in itself. This is yet another example of dumbing down news coverage”, and “Calling for the public to get more involved in reporting just takes us further down the road of sensationalism.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4728945.stm

A London blogger who survived the Edgewater Road bombing explained his experience with citizen journalism from a victim’s point of view, saying “As I stepped out people with camera phones vied to try and take pictures of the worst victims. In crisis some people are cruel. The people on the train weren’t all trying to take pictures, we were shocked, dirty, and helping each other.” Xeni Jardin, a freelance technology journalist, remarked "It's like the behavior when you see with a car wreck on the highway. People stop and gawk. There's a sense that this is some sort of animal behavior that's not entirely compassionate or responsible.” To find out more about “citizen paparazzi, read http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050712glaser/

One thing is for certain, as technology improves, citizen journalists will grow radically. The real question is how with the mainstream media respond. Clearly people now view the news in a different way as they can participate in news...as it happens to them.

We’re just at the beginning.