My finger on the pulse of The Times...

Following up on my post yesterday about the London bombings, The New York Times is all over this today with an article about blogs and Flickr contributing to a new paradigm in reporting:

Online photo-sharing sites and Web blogs began chronicling the attacks soon after they occurred, posting material often gathered before professional news organizations arrived on the scenes.

"A lot of what's being done by the citizen-journalist will be most useful as people start pulling together the best images and stories," he said. "There was a cliche that journalists write the first draft of history. Now I think these people are writing the first draft of history at some level, and that's an important shift."

[from The New York Times]

Of course, unspoken in all this is that it’s geeks who are changing the face of news because we’re the ones carrying around digital cameras and camera phones as a regular thing and playing with them all the time, and then we’re the ones to whom it actually occurs to share the resulting images with the whole Web. I mean, I guess everyone has that instinct to take a picture of something weird or different or interesting ("What is it?" "I dunno!" "Quick, take my picture in front of it!"), but geeks are the people with the technological inclination to use a camera all the time, not just when we’re on vacation, to document everything... and once in a while we happen to capture something really amazing. (Some artists might carry cameras all the time, but for other reasons.) You’re just never gonna see an image like this:

coming from a reporter who arrives after shit has already gone down.

[image from mobloguk]

It’s like we’re all Ernie Pyle now, in the line of fire and conveying the experience to everyone else.

(Oo, and by the way: Ernie Pyle was an Xer of his time...)