"SMS (Short Message Service) is like the new shortwave," and then the message was garbled by obfuscation. "SMS is like the new short-wave radio but it can be hindered (due to high traffic to networks or provider shut-down).Still, it’s how we spread the news of our own situation as it unfolded. However, if the news industry can’t rely on real-time citizen reports, then they need to rely on real-time reports from embedded reporters. In this way reporters like @UgandaTalks acted as sort of an authoritative filter. We know he’s a journalist working for The Independent, we know he’s on the ground.
He knows some of the citizen journalists and forwarded (or re-tweeted) a lot of what they were reporting while also offering his own perspective. While the major news outlets of Uganda also turned to Twitter, most used the service differently, either to push non-realtime articles or to offer sporadic updates. The bigger problem here is that when there were indeed unverified reports of a ‘media blackout’ they couldn’t offer any context at all. Why? Because they are ‘big media’ and they were most likely the ones ‘blacked out’. Their silence only verified those initial reports for some and made everyone else suspicious. This is where an application like Ushahidi shines, in the collection of reports and contextualization of them with qualitative data (verified versus unverified, identifying bloggers versus news outlets etc.)" Appfrica Mobile, 13 September 2009
(Kim Elliott blog)
