GRAND BALLROOM SOUTH — Crisis reporting captures real-time disasters and produces uncut footage and information as news happens. Reporters adapt to whatever technology is on hand. The session Quakes to Coups featureed four experts in covering international conflicts and disaster.
Student reporters Grace Muller and Melissa Quijada live blogged the session in real time. Using an iPhone4, Lauren Santa Cruz covered the session as a visual reporter would cover a disaster, shaky video and all. These techniques emulate how journalists would report amid international disaster and chaos. The top of this post shows their coverage. The students analyze the results below.
More video
Panelist Solana Larsen talks about why motivated users choose to post timely coverage of crisis events:
Four audience members talk about the panel discussion:
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The student journalists who covered “Quakes to Coups: Tools for Crisis Reporting” describe what it was like to cover the session with those tools:
“Senses heighten when you feel the journalistic burden to produce quality analysis of an issue in a time crunch. Maintaining a steady eye and ear to the actions around me to help live-blog the session, proved much harder than I anticipated. It takes a certain high-level mental agility and coordination with other individuals to report from a chaotic environment. Reporting a crisis, as the panel reiterated, cannot be done alone.” –Melissa Quijada
“It was my first time using the iPhone4 HD video capabilities. I shot the videos and edited them with iMovie on the phone, then uploaded them to YouTube as the session was unfolding. All in all it was a problem-free endeavor. Very user friendly and accessible to anyone.” — Lauren Santa Cruz
“The most intimidating part of reporting the crisis reporting session was how many other people were also live blogging the session. Using Cover It Live was super easy. ONA was the perfect event to use it since we could use other people’s tweets to supplement what we were writing.” — Grace Muller
Additional help
Heather Hodder contributed to this coverage.
