Citizen Journalism in Iran

This link to "Super-filtered #IranElection info for the easily overwhelmed" was given in a blog posting from the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism organization:
http://iran.robinsloan.com

Here's the blog posting:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=165524

The page is set up dashboard-fashion a la Google News. It's mostly Tweets and photos from sources that the page's author (Robin Sloan of Current TV) deems reliable. It's an interesting approach to a situation where the story is huge and happening fast, but there are no professional journalists on the scene to verify observations, ask questions, or provide context.

One especially poignant 40-second video clip making the rounds shows a young woman bleeding to death on the street, as frantic bystanders try to save her. Who was she? What actually happened to her? What was she doing before she was injured? Who shot the video and what was their purpose in showing us this? No one seems to know, it's just raw emotion with few facts.

This whole citizen journalism thing is changing the political landscape -- how can a dictator lie to the world when he has thousands of cell phone cameras broadcasting live coverage? At the same time, those of us on the outside have to evaluate what we are seeing and try to make some sense of all the changing, conflicting, overlapping information that comes pouring in. I am so curious to find out how we will be getting our news 10 years from now.