Social Media

MobLogic Host Lindsay Campbell Arrested


Do you watch the MobLogic podcast?  It's an interesting show covering current events and politics in America.  It's a CBS property, but was a spin-off of the WallStrip podcast, hosted by Lindsay Campbell, the former host of that show. Of late, they've been covering the story and fall-out of Sean Bell. From the WikiPedia entry (which contains the most unbiased summary I can find of the matter:

The Sean Bell shooting incident took place in the New York City borough of Queens on November 25, 2006, in which three unarmed African-American men were shot at fifty times by plainclothes NYPD officers, killing one of the men, Sean Bell, on the morning of his wedding day, and severely wounding two of his friends. The incident sparked fierce criticism of the police from the public and drew comparisons to the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo. Three of the five detectives involved in the shooting went to trial  on charges ranging from manslaughter to reckless endangerment, but were found not guilty

As a part of her coverage, Lindsay took part of a planned protest where a number of protesters were arrested to bring attention to the fading memory of the court's verdict.  Instead of standing aside during the arrests and protest, she chose to be arrested along with the protesters, and in the process, got probably the most in-depth profile of what was going on.

You can watch the entire episode below.

I was first pointed to this episode by Duncan Riley over at Inquisitr, who gave her big accolades for taking part in the story, instead of simply observing it from the sidelines.

The whole happening raises a lot of interesting questions on the nature of journalism, and what the role of a journalist is. One thing that New Media journalists like to do is break all the rules. It isn't uncommon for the same business and tech journalists to invest in the companies write about.  Since the very humble beginnings of indie and New Media journalists, opinion is unabashedly infused with news delivery.

So then is it the very next logical step for journalists to drop the final pretense in their position and top being independent of the story and finally become the story? That's a hard call to make.

On the other hand, a lot of folks have been making the point that the future of news delivery isn't just in social media, it's in social networking. This weekend, most of the blogosphere noted how quickly the news of the Chinese earthquake broke on Twitter, and according to SEO Journal, beat the geological survey by several minutes. In this case, the news was obviously reported first by those involved in the story, and this trend in first-person reporting is likely not to be a phenomenon that decreases over time.

Certainly now tools like Twitter and FriendFeed remain dominantly used only in the early adopter crowd, but it won't be forever that social networking sites that lend themselve towards journalistic tools remain out of the mainstream. When that time comes, it'll no longer be a philosophical question of what the policy will be, but a fact of life that simply is.

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