Friday, January 15, 2010

Social Media give Haiti Victims a voice

The Guardian reports on the importance of social media in disaster situations:

With many of the official lines of communication down, user-generated content played an important role yesterday in spreading news about the Haiti earthquake. Social media partly made up for the lack of information from the affected area on what had happened and what was most needed.

Twitterfeeds gave an impressive picture of the ongoing earthquake, and the Guardian's live blog on the rescue mission used social media as well as information from other news organisations. The BBC also covered the event combining tweets from the area with the work of its reporter Matthew Price in Port-au-Prince.

However, the news organisation with the most material on the quake at present looks to be CNN. It has seven reporters on the ground – but is still significantly enriching their work with social media.