By: Daryl Lang There are two uprisings right now related to Iran. The most important one is visible in the massive street demonstrations, in Iran and worldwide, by people dissatisfied with the contested reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A lesser, but still important, uprising concerns dissatisfaction with news coverage.
You'll notice this crystallizing right now among Internet users -- especially on Twitter. (If you haven't done so yet, search Twitter for the
hashtag #iranelection.)
The general sentiment is that the mainstream media was too slow and too cautious in covering the Iran election. Consider this the first major news story to have totally slipped out of the groove of the established news outlets, and is now being told to audiences directly by people involved in it.
Many Twitter commentators are relying on photos from Tehran for facts about what's going on.
Twitter users who want to spread news about Iran are grabbing pictures from news sites and posting them on the picture sharing service TwitPic. Below is one example ? an AFP photo by Behrouz Mehri, shot today in Tehran showing a massive crowd in support of reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. It quickly
appeared on TwitPic and has been viewed thousands of times. In the hour or so it took to research and write this post, the view count jumped from 35,000 to 49,000.
That's just one example. Many additional photos are being used to support the updates that citizen journalists are publishing in 140-character bursts. On Twitter, the professional photographers and photo services that provide these photographs are going largely uncredited.
Meanwhile, the role of editors is being diminished. The new information model involves millions of users ripping apart the packaging of news, and putting it back together as they see fit.
True, far more people are watching the news on TV than are getting it from Twitter. But this is still a drastic change in how people get information about international affairs. Watch for more on this in the days ahead.
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Nielsen Business Media
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