G20 protestors gathered in London

As the G20 protests in the City gathered pace today, I like many others, turned to Twitter to keep updated.

It is at times like this when I fear that newspapers in their print form really are redundant. Who wants to find out the news tomorrow morning when they can watch the action unfold via the many 24 hour news mediums available?

Twitter has revolutionised the way in which news is dispersed. Journalists and citizen journalists alike no longer have to wait to file their copy by email, phone or when they get back to the office. They do not even have to switch on a camera and do a report. They can give minute by minute accounts from the scene.

Of course this means a completely different type of news report. Facts may become sketchy and grammar may go out the window as events are reported quickly and often from the centre of the action.

This is not the first time Twitter has become a source of breaking news, during the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, Twitter updates kept the world updated from inside the Taj Mahal Palace hotel.

This is presents an exciting opportunity for journalism and I hope it may get reporters, who are now often confined to the newsrooms, back out where the news is happening.

Picture: from felixthehat on Flickr

I suppose this will always be the problem with news from war zones. Everyone there is- understandably – panicking and the news wires are buzzing with the latest news, which journalists are hurriedly putting on to web pages.

This is where the saturation of the news market is good in that we have 24 hour news from multiple sources. Yet it’s a minefield and who do we believe? I will always rely on the proven news sources, I have just been reading the BBC news website and Reuters. But they are not on the ground, or if they do have reporters there, they will not have the same accounts as the locals, whose families are involved or caught up in the violence. This is where citizen journalism comes into its own.

However, looking at  Adrian Monck‘s blog, he has linked to a call for people on Twitter to “Please stop tweeting” about the Mumbai police operations. From what I gathered from my course mates this is for security reasons. Which raises the question which I’ve asked before, does citizen journalism do more harm than good? It can get its facts wrong, creat unnecessary panic and even harm state security!

Here a couple of examples of what people had to say:

I think this is a good example of allowing interaction between news and its readers and this is what the future of journalism is all about.

Often we (journalists and the news reading public) think that other people just do not care about what is going on in the world. The Flickr site with its pages of messages is another proof- along with the much viewed election coverage- that people do care about what is going on at home and abroad and if given a platform will happily share their views.

This slightly concerns me. I’m all for new journalism and breaking down the hierarchy of the journalist as the source of information and the public willingly lapping it up, without a forum to share their knowledge and opinion. However, the idea that anyone can now put information on a website without it being verified is a bit worrying.

Chris provided us with an example of when Apple stock dropped 10% in one day on 3 October because a citizen had misreported on CNN’s ireport site that Steve Jobs had suffered a massive heart attack. This is just one example of the mess that can be created when people get it wrong. I’m not saying journalists are 100% accurate all of the time, although they should strive to be, but they are held responsible for what they print in a way which citizens are not.

With the stock exchange on automatic trading systems (for want of a more technical word as I’m not up to speed with stock trader jargon) a misreported or misconstrued story, which is picked up by the machines will send stock trading left, right and centre and what would that do to our fragile economic system? It probably doesn’t bear thinking about. And that’s just the stock market. I just can’t help feeling that this concept is too dangerous until it is regulated in some form.