A tweet by fellow Havasite, David Jones (@davidjoneshavas) got me thinking. He tweeted: “#instagram proves that a picture speaks a thousand words with 473,343 photos uploaded under #sandy”
It’s disasters like the hurricane Sandy that often re-defines the use of media. First, blogs, like Huffington Post, started to replace traditional media but now it seems that citizen journalism produced in social media is replacing digital media.
As the power went out in NYC both HuffingtonPost and Gawker went off line. Over the past couple of years I’ve started to rely on HuffingtonPost as a news source, yet all day I couldn’t get the site to reload on my iPhone. Hence, I went to the source, social media. Following the storm on instagram and twitter without the editorial lens of HuffingtonPost made it a more nuanced and human experience hearing many different sides to the same story.
As the tragedy of Sandy abates, how will the sands of media change? My hunch is they will become more democratic from more empowered citizens. Everyone will be a producer of content. And, I'll be relying more on these newer sources to get closer to the action.
Likewise, the unit of organization in industries, like Journalism, will continue to dissolve, to a unit of one, the citizen journalist.