On December 26th, 2004 an earthquake with a 9.1 magnitude hit Sumatra-Andaman; the 6th deadliest earthquake was not the only incident of that day. Roughly an hour after, a Tsunami occurred, creating further damage and more deaths. Although the earthquake was centered in Sumatra-Andaman, it affected most of the other countries in Southeast Asia. Because these natural disasters occurred with little warning, news corporations were unable to report on the initial damages and occurrences. This brings me to the main topic of this post: VLOGS and their impact in the media, specifically relating to the earthquake/tsunami.

Major news corporations were unable to cover the event and therefore people who wanted information about it had to look elsewhere. Blogs and Vlogs became a source of information for people to gather information. With countless videos taken with handheld devices camera phones, they became invaluable resources for news. Not only was there footage of the Tsunami actually happening but it was from the point of view of people actually experiencing it. Most of the videos were poor quality or grainy, but this added to the personal quality that allowed viewers to experience the terror and chaos through the eyes of someone actually experiencing it. Had major news corporations been there to capture video and photographs, it is likely the footage would have been clear, focused and edited, which would not have evoked the emotions the others videos did. Although Youtube was not out at this time, people found ways of sharing their videos and stories- blogs.

The ideas of blogs had been around for a while but this was a new way of using them, to report news. They were a way for citizen journalists to share news that big news companies did not have access to. The bloggers uploaded video footage of the tsunami but did not expect the large amount of traffic their sites received, some bloggers were even fined because they exceeded their bandwidth. In response, aggregate sites jumped in to help, two examples are the waveofdestruction and media bloggers association. This foreshadowed and emphasizes the importance of websites like youtube which hosts many different videos.

Additionally, today there are various websites and systems that have improved the way we communicate and share news. One example of that is twitter, where you can share a thought in  140 characters max. The option to follow other twitterers, allows you to get instant updates in real time. This has been used in the case of natural disasters to keep family members informed of what is going on and to locate missing people. Another example would be Facebook where people post something and simultaneously all of their friends can see it- easier than individually emailing or calling people. I remember in the recent earthquake in Japan my Aunt posted on her Facebook a message confirming that Tommy (my cousin who lives in Japan) was ok. It was a fast and easy way to let everyone know at once that he was safe.

Lastly, I would like to mention the way news sites get hold of personal videos for personal use. Many times news sites will pay people to use video but a comment was made it class about how news sites are trying to get out of paying- for example, CNN has come up with ireport where you can upload news videos to share them with others. This is an easy way to gather news footage from average citizens without paying for it. With the technological advances, it increasingly becomes easier for citizen journalists to report.

Here is a videos of the Tsunami:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9myoVB6m4Wg

McKenna Duffy