So Happy to Be Home

No postings for a month, and here I'm doing two in one day. I am so grateful, relieved, and dog-tired, but I am home safe and sound. Earlier this evening I had no clue what was waiting for me after I left the office. Here's what the email notice said:
(ID 55699) Disruption at Fort Totten. Trains are turning back at Brookland-CUA & Silver Spring due to a police situation outside of Fort Totten station. Shuttle bus service has been established.

Actually, the message above is from 9:30 tonight, but it's the same message that I saw at about 5:30, as I was getting ready to pack up and leave the office. I didn't know until a couple of hours later that "disruption" meant that around 5 PM one train rear-ended another one with so much force that the back train rode up over the front train, ripping out the floor. Six people are dead, about 70 injured. My normal 1-hour commute took almost 3.5 hours, and it involved two trains, a hike through the District of Columbia to try and find a bus that could squeeze in another few people, a 7-mile bus ride that took the better part of an hour, and a one-mile bus ride that took about 15 minutes (instead of the usual 5-7).

In situations like this, one's fellow commuters are somehow friendlier and chattier, even if we are all tired and stressed out. Something about all being on the lifeboat together brings out the camaraderie. I ran into my upstairs neighbor during my quest for a Metro bus, and somehow she was reminded of a bus trip to a Beatles concert in Philadelphia, which piqued the interest of a fellow bus rider we had never met before. We also picked up bits of the crash story from people who were getting cell phone updates from their friends and families. We learned that the S9 express bus starts out at 13th and I Street -- wish we had known this before, this kind of information is pure gold to those of us who rely on public transportation. But I will know this next time. I hope there isn't a next time, but I know there will be.

In any case, my neighbor Yvonne and I got home with nothing worse than a case of tired feet. I am thankful to be home. It could have been so much worse.

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.