Twitter is revolutionizing the way people gather and disseminate news, and today there’s no better example of that than what’s happening in Iran.
After Friday’s hotted contested presidential elections saw the apparent re-election of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by a landslide, supporters of challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi took to the streets in what looks to be the biggest rioting and protests since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
In the past 72 hours, Iranian citizens and traditional news organizations have taken to Twitter, blogs and other social networks to share what’s happening with the world. Through short reports on the social network, photos on Flickr and newspaper websites, live blog updates and video feeds, activists and observers are recording what is happening in the country, which has shut down other forms of communication.
Other quick take aways from what’s happening:
** As foreign press are being threatened and asked to leave the country, lines between trained journalists and citizen journalists are blurring. Man-on-the-street reports, photos and video of what’s happening are coming from a variety of sources, making it more critical than ever that news gathering organizations use their experience and professional standards to act as curators and pull together multimedia packages from various information sources and make sure people know what those sources are.
** In a Twitter world, people want constant coverage and complain when they don’t get it. When CNN and other networks didn’t provide the kind of 24/7 coverage U.S. viewers wanted they took their protests to Twitter. In fact, Twitter’s become so important to the news, when the company announced a service interruption for scheduled maintenance at what would have been Tuesday morning in Iran, subscribers made such a stink the work was rescheduled to occur at 1:30 a.m. Tehran time.
** For a well-curated sample of what’s happening in Tehran, plus continuing commentary of how mainstream media and other are covering it, check out Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish column at TheAtlantic.com.