ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications for journalism of the revolutionary changes the digital age has wrought. Natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, the Myanmar uprising in 2007, and a catastrophic earthquake in Southwest China in 2008 spawned several citizen journalism initiatives that showed how socially networked the news can be in a digital age. Mnookin responded to news of the tragedy by using his smartphone to tweet, to follow law enforcement's activities, to crowd-source his journalism, to geomap where he was and where the news was taking him, and to coordinate with other journalists how to cover the large and fluid story. Mnookin and Qu practiced a then new form of networked journalism that combined the speed and immediacy of social media with journalism's discipline of verification. The use of Twitter in Boston also shows perhaps that the tendency to pit social media against traditional journalism is now obviously wrong-headed.
