New Media Reporting From London

Over 50 people were killed and 700 injured on Thursday July 7, 2005 when four bomb explosions ripped through three subway trains and a double-decker bus in what appears to have been a coordinated terror attack during London's morning rush hour. A previously unknown group, calling itself the "Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe," claimed it was responsible in a web site posting in which Italy and Denmark were warned to withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

As is usual in these modern times, the blogosphere immediately went about the business of letting the world know what it thought and how it felt about this terrible tragedy — as well as every other issue it saw as being somehow related. Within minutes of the news breaking, every opinion along the political spectrum was posted, from the extremists who believe that all Muslims should be herded together somewhere and shot (or "nuked") to the extremists on the other end who think we ought to be understanding and sympathetic toward those who use violence and intimidation as a means of expressing their grievances. Of course, most of the commentary came from the blogosphere's vast middle and was far more reasonable and moderate than that of the extremists. The point is that a great number of pixels were quickly lit up with a large diversity of opinions.

However, the citizen journalists and bloggers who deserve the applause are those who were in London when terror and tragedy struck and who shared their firsthand experiences in words and pictures. Their stories and photographs (many taken with camera phones and transmitted instantaneously) of the moments following the explosions captured the public's attention in a way that traditional, mainstream news reporting could not.

These citizen journalists and bloggers enabled the world to view breaking news told from the first person perspective of victims and eyewitnesses so that the world could be almost right there in the midst of it all. People could see not only the horror and tragedy of the evils that man often perpetrates against man, but also the heroism and courage of the first-responders and ordinary citizens who immediately stepped up to the plate to administer first aid to the injured, comfort the traumatized and initiate the first steps in the long and arduous tasks of healing and recovery.

Article Author: Margaret Romao Toigo

Margaret Romao Toigo is a retired stripper, beauty school dropout, and wannabe intellectual who dabbles in a wide variety of fleeting endeavors and life-long obsessions. Although Ms. Toigo is not a real writer, she nonetheless has her very own web …

Visit Margaret Romao Toigo's author page — Margaret Romao Toigo's Blog