We Are The Future

Some in the mainstream media have been slow to recognise the paradigm shift in the way we receive and digest our news. Blogging has long been under attack from the mainstream media, on the grounds that allowing unregulated individuals to contribute to the news discussion somehow undermines it.

In yet another step towards showing this up as the fallacy it is, CNN has launched iReport.com. It’s still in beta but I think it’s a fascinating development, and one that should interest bloggers everywhere, even those not particularly of a technological persuasion. Most bloggers will at some point use their blog as a soapbox to speak up about an issue, even if their blog isn’t particularly political or news-based.

Of course user-generated content has some inherent flaws. The reliability of Wikipedia as a source has long been questioned. Certainly I know many people who would never rely on it for important information, and I definitely know I don’t. However I do refer to it very regularly and find it an incredibly useful source for trivia. When it comes to pop culture or sports the information in Wikipedia is often pretty accurate. Generally there’s little reason to doubt the validity of information that isn’t technical in nature.

Applied to iReport it would be interesting to see if a similar trend developed there, where news on sports or entertainment was highly accurate but more technical things like economics or science would be less reliable. Experience suggests that where a major event happens suddenly and unexpectedly, such as 9/11 or the Virginia Tech massacre, user-generated news content could be incredibly useful. I remember home videos, from video cameras and mobile phones, being used extensively to report 9/11.

Without those I suspect the true impact of events would have been hard to report as nobody was on the scene quickly enough. Not only that, but my experience with Twitter has brought me news before it’s even broken on conventional news sites. Admittedly when the news of Ledger’s death broke, I didn’t actually believe it at first, yet as more people Tweeted about it I believed it. I suspect iReport would be the same.

What really interested me, however, and I think will really interest the bloggers out there, is the idea that iReport users may find their contributions, once suitably edited or censored as needed, actually used on CNN.com or perhaps even on TV. Although we blog for ourselves, clearly we also do it in the hopes of reaching a wider audience.

Imagine your contribution on a major news network. You could reach the world.