Everybody is a Journalist

I actually wrote about this in 2002, called Blogging goes Wireless, where I said:

> This is exactly what journalists should be worried about. In a few years, millions of people will have mobile phones with high-quality integrated digital cameras. Whenever something happens anywhere in the world, pictures and eyewitness accounts will be up there on the web for everyone to see in no time. Of course, journalists will still rush to the scene to get the scoop — but the scoop will already be long gone, and journalists will almost never be the first on the scene anymore. It might not be good spelling or reporting, and it might not be objective, but it will be diverse, real and full of emotions. That’s the new way of spreading the news fast — so welcome the wireless blog, everyone.This is exactly what journalists should be worried about. In a few years, millions of people will have mobile phones with high-quality integrated digital cameras. Whenever something happens anywhere in the world, pictures and eyewitness accounts will be up there on the web for everyone to see in no time. Of course, journalists will still rush to the scene to get the scoop — but the scoop will already be long gone, and journalists will almost never be the first on the scene anymore. It might not be good spelling or reporting, and it might not be objective, but it will be diverse, real and full of emotions. That’s the new way of spreading the news fast — so welcome the wireless blog, everyone.

Now sadly blogging hasn’t been taken up so much that this is really the case yet. We are getting there though, especially with every mobile phone having a good enough camera and internet flatrates getting more common, or at least big enough data plans.

Now the Next web writes that when Twitter becomes mainstream, we won’t miss anything, making much the same point. The point is that somebody on an airplane crash twittered it live. This is actually what was missing in blogging, because you felt you needed to give some thought to it. For Twitter, just just send a Tweet and be done with it. It has to be short so it can’t really have too much thought put into it. It’s very easy, as SMS is, just like an SMS sent to everybody. This is why adoption can become higher and we get more messages out there. It’s a mixture of more people and faster posting.

I love seeing that and am really looking forward to seeing this system develop.