Citizen and Independent Journalists Are Using Social Media to Cover The Poltical Conventions
Social media tools are enabling citizen and independent journalists to provide compelling and instantaneous media coverage of the political conventions. Not only are mainstream media journalists, newspapers, and magazines using to send out news updates more quickly than ever, but now bloggers, citizen journalists, and independent journalists are using social media in innovative ways to provide compelling media coverage of events at the conventions in real time. I’ve written of once already, but The Uptake is emerging as the model for providing instantaneous video episodes of protests, arrests, police searches, and other events that took place at the Democratic Convention and that are taking place at the Republican Convention in Minneapolis–the The UpTake’s hometown (St. Paul).
The Uptake is using to film live video, But they aren’t must posting live video, The Uptake is mapping all of their video stories using Google Maps so readers can see exactly where events are taking place. Here is a an included as part of a more traditionally written story about police raids taking place in residential neighborhoods. Most of The UpTake stories are filmed and posted live and then later incorporated into written stories posted on the site. One I found particularly compelling with this describing events that lead to her detainment by the St. Paul Police.
It strikes me that what The Uptake is doing is what the new journalism could look like–a combination of live footage later contextualized completely in researched written reports online. It’s been a lot of fun watching The Uptake in action over the past week. As far as I know, The Uptake was the first news organization reporting on the house arrests taking place in St. Paul before the RNC began.
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- The Uptake Is A Must Read
- Minneapolis Police Actions Before RNC
- Ron Paul Rally and Convention Speech
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Citizen NON-journalists, like me, can also find profound utility with twitter’s capacity to send news updates to ONESELF! (And, friends and family.) Many are discovering, as they get older, that they find it hard to answer that question “what have you been doing?” Also, if you have had decades of meditation practice (intermingled with periods of marijuana pranayama practice), you may find yourself doing what Ram Dass suggested so many years ago, “Be Here Now”, and thereby exiting the world of memory. It takes work to “Go Back” in the mind and retrieve this information of past doings, so there you have it! Twitter as social media can also be used as a news service to one’s own friends and family, who ask that exhausting question (“what’s been happening?”).
Sounds like The Uptake is taking this sort of thing to a new level!