Citizen Journalism: Atlanta Tornado Updates
I am in Minnesota, so have missed the Atlanta tornado, but this from Grayson Daughters who is on the ground reporting:
Mention that cit. journalists in Atlanta are creating a “virtual” newsroom… I’m getting in reports from people on ground and redirecting them to MSM at the moment. Can’t head to field right now as I have to be home with kid, but soccer moms such as moi can surely pass info along like nobody’s business!
Also, CNN newsroom just took on water; they’ve moved ‘em to another part of bldg. Another huge storm getting ready to come through, which will send wind and rain into all the now-exposed, blown out windows/roofs of all the many damaged office buildings downtown, not to mention the homes. It’s like Hurricane Andrew… whereas the scope of the damage is just now starting to trickle in and be comprehended. It’s vast. Wish you were here!
From an earlier Daughters email:
Citizen Journalism “network” is working this Atlanta downtown tornado hard. With cells and Twitter. For instance, I just heard from pal with still cam on scene that Vine City area just behind CNN, poor and black, was hit hard, lots of damage, yet no MSM press had shown up there yet. The people were wondering why no one cares about their area. So I called AP and CNN, and a few v-loggers of course!
I was on-scene last night. Vid getting good play on YouTube and iReport.
Grayson directs me to:
Last night I turned on CNN and I heard lots of their commentators, their talking heads about the damage and the same footage over and over, but no real reporting like Daughters provided here. Am I missing something –certainly CNN did some real reporting — or has the mainstream media really given up on honest to god reporting, even when it is literally in their own house.
March 15th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
I think CNN must be a little freaked out at the moment with their newsroom havin been demolished. Charge those batteries. Go virtual. Send ‘em all home to their laptops and DSL, or out on the street with an iPhone. But I guess there could be other news in the world. Like China marching into Tibet.
March 15th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I’m in the burbs and the storms didn’t even blow the leaves of my toolshed, yet I’ve spent many hours seaching the web for video shot by individuals unrelated to major news organizations and have found close to none. This smells very fishy. It seems like big brother is blacking out individual coverage of events to prevent Katrina style bad press. I’m bookmarking you and hope you can post as many links to what the news ISN’T telling us. Seriously, this is not some conspiracy nut diatribe, in a city this size full of gadget toters and scant minutes from wifi unnaffected by the storm even in the worst hit areas there should be more than 3seconds of blurry cellphone vid on youtube by someone other than a major media source. This is MUCH scarier than the weather.
March 27th, 2008 at 11:08 am
If he ever got down from that conspiracy theory high, I hope Ghost finally figured out how to type the words “Atlanta Tornado” into YouTube. If he did, he’d stil be watching the plethora of citizen video about the tornados there. By summer, he can move on to some of the excellent offering on CNN’s iReport.
March 29th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
the lag time in information release was noticeable, spent 2 days searching under numerous variations of Atlanta Tornado on youtube and saw squat. Want to see the server logs? CNN covered mostly whatever narrowly avoided hitting them in the head and a lot of the damage in East Atlanta hardly got any documentation at all until after crews had already cleared most of it.