Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

Media140 comp: and the winner is…

Last week, I offered one reader a two-day pass to Media140, a Sydney conference that’s part of an international collaboration seeking to answer the question: “What is the future of journalism in the social media age?”

In return, I asked you guys what you thought the best journalistic use of social media you’d seen was, and why. There were some great responses, but the one that came out on top was from Jacinta Isaacs. Jacinta wrote:

Burma’s Saffron Revolution: In August and September 2007 tens of thousands of monks led what became the biggest protest in Burma’s history since the country’s 1988 popular uprising. It was journalists’ use of Burmese bloggers’ contacts, leads, and eyewitness accounts that ensured that much of the brutality that took place during those days made it into our television or newspaper reports, despite the junta’s shutting down of the country’s nationalised ISPs. It was through these bloggers’ accounts that we saw the now iconic bloated body of a monk floating face down in a muddy pond and heard rumors of the junta’s secret mass cremations. It became clear that, far from being usurped by citizen journalists, mainstream journalists and bloggers needed each other, and even more so in a repressive media environment.

Media140 founder Ande Gregson explains: “For me this embodies the power of ‘social’ media. A repressive regime can be exposed through the simple means of a network of individuals using a community to relate information about a given event to a global audience in real time without any censorship or control, fundamentally undermining the very foundations on which certain political regimes are founded and built.”

Big congrats to Jacinta. And for everyone else, you can still buy tickets here.