The air-supported dome of BC Place, Vancouver’s major stadium, collapsed yesterday and I first heard the news from a corner-store clerk, who got it from the radio. Back home, I scanned the TV channels and found nothing. The web sites of major media provided the basic breaking news coverage and some images, most of them citizen-generated. The best visual coverage, by far, was in local blogs and at Flickr.
(In a bit of silliness, I seem to recall that the Vancouver Sun was boasting that the citj cellphone image at its site was “exclusive.” That particular image may have been, but it was virtually identical to half-a-dozen shots circulating on the web. The age of the breaking news “exclusive” is dead, dead, dead. I can’t find the page I saw yesterday, so there’s no link.)
Darren Barefoot has a nice round-up of some of the citj coverage, posted late yesterday afternoon, including links to videos at YouTube.
All this adds weight to the point that Dan Gillmor made in his much-discussed and much-dissed post The Decline (and Maybe Demise) of the Professional Photojournalist, that when it comes to breaking news, the citizens are going to repeatedly beat the pros simply because they are there and they’re cameraed-up.
TAGS: PHOTOJOURNALISM, BREAKING NEWS, BC PLACE
