E-Media Tidbits

Here's a great "citizen reporter" anecdote from last week (via Picturephoning.com). An act of alleged racism by Portland (Oregon) police was caught by a witness with a photo phone. In the late hours last Tuesday, police officers parked their car -- decorated with a large stuffed gorilla strapped to the hood -- in front of a restaurant where a mostly black crowd had gathered for a hip-hop show. The gorilla was considered by many attending the event to be a racist taunt. One witness took photos of the car with his camera phone, and the images were published in the Portland Tribune and shown on local TV news reports.

As I've been noting in my frequent coverage of photo phones here, the devices -- because of their coming ubiquity -- make extraordinary witness tools. While this sort of thing has happened for years with traditional cameras and video-cams, few people typically happened to be carrying those devices just when something newsworthy like this happened. With a photo phone in many pockets, the odds of a witness capturing an important breaking news event increase exponentially. And as in this case, witness shots from photo phones often can be taken on the sly; the Portland police officers didn't know they'd been photographed. Portland news photographers didn't need to be there -- though that would have been nice -- a citizen reporter was.