Citizen journalism still in its infancy

US South African academic Vincent Maher is disappointed that more citizen journalism didn't spring from yesterday's explosions in London.

Maher, who teaches multimedia journalism at the New Media Lab at Rhodes University's School of Journalism and Media Studies, wrote:

What this says to me, despite my enthusiasm for citizen journalism and the we media is that we have a long way to go. It could start with getting paid, of course but I think the real problem is that it is simply too easy to sit and wait for someone else to write it up and then provide commentary. Journalists are expected to get up and physically go there, take a photo, do something and get back to post the story ... bloggers seem to get away with armchair journalism and its getting worse and worse.

What we need is people posting pics and stories from their phones, as and when the events happen. Those people are the real deal as citizen journalists go. Email me examples if you find any - I haven’t as yet.

Maher's right that not a lot of citizen journalism went on yesterday. But there are good reasons why bloggers were "getting away with armchair journalism".

First: one cannot expect many London bloggers sitting at home or at work in, say, Hammersmith, on hearing about yesterday's explosions two weeks to the day after bombs that killed 52 innocent people, to jump in a cab and head for the scene of the blasts, not least because the Metropolitan police were pleading with people to stay where they were. So, not surprisingly, bloggers were restricted to regurgitating the breaking news coverage unless they happened to be on the scene of one of the explosions. What images there were reflected what was going on in the immediate vicinity of the snapper: see these ones on Flickr, or this one sent by Adam Randall from his phone to his moblog of roads being closed close to the Old Bailey and video of a pub being evacuated.