Each week, Social Circles brings you the biggest news from behind the social networks. Keep up to date with the latest trends, breaking news, and expert analysis from across the web.
This week’s wrap-up includes Facebook’s new competition for LinkedIn, Uber giving passengers the opportunity to play DJ, and a major shake-up at reddit’s head offices.
Citizen journalism just got a whole lot more high-tech.
CNN is bringing iReport, their citizen journalism site that allows anyone to post content free of editing, fact-checking, and screening, to Google Glass. This will expand the opportunity for iReporters to submit video and photo coverage of breaking news as it happens.
As with all other content on iReport, CNN can choose to edit and ensure the validity and credibility of photos or videos taken with Google Glass, and broadcast them on their platforms during live, or recorded, news coverage.
Using user-generated content in order to stay on top of spot news is nothing exclusive to CNN, of course. In times of immediate breaking news, especially during times of emergency (natural disaster, security concerns, etc.) TV news outlets scramble to ask permission to use tweeted photos or call for their viewers to submit content to them.
The tragic events and subsequent investigation of last year’s Boston Marathon bombings became one of the first real explorations of the power of crowdsourced news during crises in the U.S. In Canada, a shooting in the food court at Toronto’s Eaton Centre demonstrated the same shift north of the border.
While news teams rush to gather their equipment or redirect their van to the scene of events, smartphones and tablets of those on scene were already capturing the action. The major broadcasters repurposed tweets, Instagram photos, and YouTube videos of the scene at the Marathon’s finish line. During the pursuit of the perpetrators in the following days, the news media relied on social media to get images of the police sweep. Andrew Kitzenberg had his photos of the manhunt shared across not only social media, but the television screens of major broadcasters. CNN even profiled Kitzenberg in the video below.
Kyle Brown 