Egypt protests: What really is social media’s role?

I’ve watched more Al Jazeera today than I have in the past 10 years. The protests in Egypt have turned this into the news network’s coming-out moment, much in the way news events in the 1980s put CNN on the map. The reasons for this should be fairly clear for the professional journalist. We’ve been cutting foreign news bureaus over the years to squeeze out a few more bucks for shareholders, and so when crisis happens overseas we are not well positioned to cover it in any kind of detail. It’s why the Chilean miners coverage so much last fall; because of coverage like that, we cannot be ready for this.

In moments like this, there is a vacuum. So while U.S. journalists are still packing their bags to parachute in and cover Egypt, we turn to what we have. Al Jazeera is streaming coverage online. Citizens armed with mobile tools are , giving us video, pictures and Twitter messages. This is the building blocks of news now when the journalist-observer is not there to see it for themselves.

Given all of that, it’s hard to argue against social media as a tool for citizen journalism, but what about as a tool for activism? Read more