Digital revolution: Rise of the citizen journo

YOUTUBE frames of “Neda”, a young Iranian woman whose face is covered in blood, are a horrific image of what some are calling the Tehran spring. They also show the genie unleashed by citizen journalists.

Identified on the website flickr as Neda Agha Soltan, the young woman shown on camera-phone footage falling, apparently shot, on the edges of a protest at Iran’s disputed elections has drawn a passionate response worldwide. Dubbed a “murdered angel” on the popular Sina.com Chinese website, her name in Persian yields 15,300 results on Persian language sites, according to Google.

Neda Agha Soltan studied at the philosophy department of Tehran University and over the past few days has become an icon of the opposition movement – her photo is on all the placards of Mousavi supporters, many of whom vow revenge.

The YouTube pictures came from an internet source known to Reuters television. Since Reuters and other foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran, they increasingly depend on people like the one on whose cameraphone Neda’s death was recorded.

Iran has more internet connections than any country in the Middle East. According to PRI’s “The World” technology podcast it arrested its first blogger in 2003. So for some commentators, it is a fitting place for citizen journalism through sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to come of age.

Others see a complex revolution under way.

In the early days after the election, the micro-blogging site Twitter was a prominent venue for the cat-and-mouse game of finding internet proxies for use by people whose access from Iran was blocked.

People posting the web addresses to help Iranians evade government filtering reached a peak when celebrities joined in, only to be reminded that the Iranian authorities had access to Twitter too.

But it was thanks to these proxies that people have managed to release pictures to the outside world.

A journalistic problem with images of demonstrations and violence is that besides what can be seen or technologically verified, the context of events or the identities of those involved often cannot be independently proven.

Some sources check what is offered, starting with knowing their contributors, contacting them by email where possible and using whatever metadata the images carry to verify when and where they were taken.

“We have to hold ourselves to the same journalistic standards as the mainstream press,” said Jonathan Tepper, chief operating officer of photo website Demotix.

Jeff Jarvis, author and professor of interactive journalism at City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism, said in his blog the events show how Twitter, by making its code freely available to people for manipulation into useful tools, was becoming indispensable.

“But it’s by no means the final word in digital revolutions. I know we will soon see witnesses and participants to events such as these broadcasting them live from their mobile phones. We will see people organising with Google Maps. We can’t imagine what will come next.”