If you have kept up with this blog, or many others for that
matter, you have seen everyone and their mothers write about the Boston
Marathon Bombings. Of the many
lessons I have learned from this tragedy, one that stands out to me is that
our entire nation is starting to view news in a different manner from different
sources.
As a former journalist, as soon as news broke of the two
bombings, you would think I would head to The
Boston Herald or The New
York Times. Not in 2013. The first news source I went to was Facebook. After
doing a little digging, I found out I wasn’t the only one. Instead of hearing
from the professionals, I wanted to see and view the story through the eyes of
my friends and family. Just saying this puts a cringe in my stomach, but that
is the way our world is going.
Who can blame us? When every citizen out there is their own
reporter, with smartphones capable of taking HD video or photos and instantly
posting them online, why wait for the dinosaurs to report? We now live in a day
an age of the 24/7 news cycle and with the help of Vine, Facebook, Twitter and
every other social network out there, professional
news sources are losing credibility by the day.
I realize that any news I see on Facebook won’t be 100% accurate. Hell, it may not be 1% accurate. Nonetheless, the fact that a former journalist who still believes in the true power and responsibility of good reporting went to Facebook instead of an established news source shows that our world is truly evolving before our very eyes.
At school, they called the idea of citizens reporting the
news citizen journalism. Supposedly, this has been going on for centuries. I
wonder if they ever knew it would get this far.
Where did you go online when you heard of the Boston Marathon Bombings?
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