Breaking News 2.0: On Southern California Fires
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | October 24, 2007 | Share This
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As the sole member of the Reprise Media team choking on the San Fernando Valley’s smoky air at the moment, I’ve been following the online news coverage of the Southern California fires very closely, hoping the flames stay away from my northwest corner of the SFV.
Fires are quite common in Southern California, but we don’t usually get so many of them in so many places, all at once (at least, not as far as I can remember). As of late Tuesday night, the last few days of fires have caused at least one death, the evacuation of more than 800,000 people, and the destruction of more than a thousand homes and nearly half a million acres of land. Bloggers are pointing out that this tragedy is also groundbreaking for the way it’s being covered by many ordinary people - and also to some extent by press - on so many different social media sites. Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Google Maps mashups are all sources of information and first-hand accounts.
My hometown paper, the LA Times, is doing a decent job of getting out information with their Google Map and live Twitter updates. But the best updates I found were in the sources in this post on CenterNetworks, which aggregated all the social media reportage about the fires. Also, this post on Search Engine Land has a useful list of fire maps. By far the most useful and authoritative information I found today, though, was in GigaOM’s report: the LA Fire Department is issuing Twitter updates (with more than 400 followers).
It’s exciting to see social media used for such an important, time-sensitive event that is so outside of human control. I imagine that most people were still checking local TV news for their updates, probably unaware that many of the newsrooms putting those stories together may have been relying on social media to find them in the first place.
Topics: Social Media, Technology |