Early Friday morning at about 5:00am, my wife and I were awakened to a hoard of sirens, both police cars and fire engines. It's not unusual for a police chase to occur in our neighborhood; in fact, we have come to expect the semi-regular sirens and various events as living in Ogden seems to come with certain "privileges." However, this was different; there was much more noticeable emergency response traffic. My wife and I were like "what is going on?"
I get up and look out the front window and notice a few police cars up at the corner. Next I look out the kitchen window on the side of the house, and note that the amount of ambient light is greater than normal for the dark hour. My neighbor's house was lit up differently than it normally would be. "That's weird," I thought to myself. I thought maybe they had installed a new outdoor light.
I follow the light source to see a ridiculously huge blaze, flames reaching a good 3-4 stories in the air, and immediately knew someone's house was on fire. I didn't have my contacts in, so I couldn't make out exactly whose house, but it was close, less than 50 yards. I assumed a close neighbor's house, off the back of our property, that was currently unoccupied.
I hollered at my wife to come and look, then scrambled to put my contacts in, and shoes and coat on. I grabbed the video camera and headed outside. The house in question was not the abandoned one that is closer to our property on the back. It was, instead, one house further up the street.
Tragically, this home was occupied by an elder lady, age 74. We hadn't seen her for awhile, so Jess and I both hoped that the house was empty and that the woman might be living with a relative or in a nursing care facility. With the size of the blaze, there was no chance that anyone could have survived if they hadn't gotten out immediately.
Indeed, after the fire was put out, the fire fighters found the body of the elderly woman living in the house. From the looks of it, apparently she was very close to getting to the front door. She was in a wheel chair, however, and so I assume this likely slowed her exit. The amount of smoke, or so I can imagine, would have been been extremely difficult to deal with if constrained to a wheel chair.
The home is a complete loss. The family of the woman obviously very shocked. Overall, it was a very tragic and unfortunate event that you could only pray to never have happen to you or your loved ones.
So, that's the story. But I have another reason for writing today...
I mentioned that I grabbed my video camera and started filming the blaze from our back yard. I did this originally just of interest to me; I've been trying to video record various novel events just as some sort of family diary. Only after the day had broke and all the news crews arrived that I thought the video might bring value to the news community as whole.
For class, I've been reading the book The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. The short summary of the book is in basically how the walls of global economic barriers are being broken by technologies like the internet. How the world is being "flattened" by various forces allowing a level of human equality, particularly in the competitive global marketplace, to exist that the world has never known.
A good example of the flat world is with regards to the media and the sources of our news. The blogosphere has become an extremely important aspect to our news, enabling any Joe Schmoe to be a self-contained media company and trustworthy news source.
I strongly believe that news in the future will, in fact, have a stronger active community tone to it. Originally, I'm sure the Associated Press was more accepting of independent news journalists. I know independents can still get published, but it's much harder today, and really there has been a lock down in the news distribution channels such that the community feel of local news has more or less gone away. The local news organizations, newspapers and TV, still portray a "local" feel, and I believe they honestly try to represent and serve the community. But, I also believe these local news organizations have seen the writing on the wall and know their time is coming to an end. The new flat world reporters, local bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers, are ultimately going to drive the news of the future.
The only hope I can see is for the traditional news organizations to partner with local bloggers, basically lending their name and distribution networks to the small independent voices. With the potential of so many voices, it becomes as important a role to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. In the future, this will be the role that media companies are relegated to. They are already adept at making these kinds of content decisions, but in the future, the sources of news will originate from the independent blogosphere and not dominantly from their own resource pool.
I thought it would be interesting to see which news stations would use my video in their reports, particularly under my explicit requirement that they give attribution for the video's source. I spoke with the reporters from Fox 13, KSL 5, and KUTV 2, all of them were interested in possibly using the video in their spots. I got their email addresses and sent a link to the video which I had already uploaded to my hosting server. I gave the exact requirement that they must include a small attribution "Courtesy Adam Taft" on or under the video if they decided to use it.
The video was honestly not worth any money. It's not like I could have marketed it in any way. It was just a typical local camcorder recording, shaky and jittery, bad lighting, poorly framed, etc. But, even if it was perfect and I could have sold it, I wouldn't because of my somewhat utopian belief that we should all be responsible for contributing to the local news and that we should never give up the independent voice or leave all our news content in the hands of a select few corporations.
Out of the three news organizations that I sent the video to, only one of them used it in their report. Fox 13 news (our local Fox news affiliate) used a good portion of the video, probably a good 4-5 seconds of it. You can view the report, made by reporter Kirk Yuhnke, here:
http://www.myfoxutah.com/myfox/pages/ContentDetail?contentId=6156896
I was very happy with the outcome of my experiment. It's hard to say why the other two news stations decided not to use the video. Perhaps, since it was shot from the back of the house, it's hard to authenticate that the burning house in the video is the same as the one in the story. Or perhaps, there was concern over the footage being perceived as too violent given the tragedy of the situation. Of course the quality was poor too.
I tend to think, however, that the notion of the flat world might have something to do with it. Fox News in general seems to be more on the "edge" and possibly more accepting of the changing world, while the other two organizations definitely feel more conservative and traditional. Maybe they just don't "get" it.
I wonder if the requirement to give attribution for the video put them off. I hope it did...
I hope it gives them a wake up call that their world is going to quickly change, and that local independent voices are rising up. Either they join us, or we leave them behind.
