The V-Tech shooting story is one more lesson for the media on the virtues of pointing directly to eyewitness accounts in blogs or elsewhere.
For examples, see the Poynter Institutes’s media-reporting roundup from Jim Romenesko, as well as Techmeme pointers, CNET and the Jarvis blog (last was spotted via Peter Brantley).
The inevitable e-book angle
So what happens when e-books finally go interactive in a big way? Authors with news pegs just might want to allow for the existence of grassroots journalism and blogs from participants in the events written about. Significantly, Sophie e-reading and authoring software provides for easy insertion of multimedia—both within a book or from a remote site.
Next—more immediately? Might we see live YouTube blogs with streaming video? It’s already being discussed, and meanwhile here are existing YT items—most of them, alas, simply downloaded from mainstream media.
Related: Wikipedia on shootings. The photo of the shooting scene is from Wikipedia—I was amazed not to find a Creative Commons search engine more useful. Also see Planet Blacksburg, including an update today, and the possibility that the shooter posted the following an online bulletin board: “hey /b/ I‘m going to kill people at vtech today in the name of anonymous.” Mean hoax? Also see Digg item and blogged photos from the campus.
Update: Techmeme roundup on blogger being mistakenly identified as killer. To the credit of the Mainstream Media, its famous filtering functions worked well. The name of the innocent blogger didn’t get spread around by the MSM, at least.
