Globe and Mail uses Twitter photos of riots in China on front page

Toronto’s Globe and Mail’s main story today on riots in China featured five photos that originally appeared on Twitter from citizens in China.

The wire service Reuters originally curated the images, and the Globe and Mail grabbed them from the service, citing both Reuters and Twitter for the photos. China is a country with tight media controls and a vast Internet filtering strategy that would have traditionally made it difficult for photos like these to be made public. But social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr are making it hard for China’s censors to keep up with its citizens.

The Internet, and social media in particular, are making it difficult for authoritarian regimes around the world to control the flow of data into and, perhaps more importantly, out of their countries. China’s fabled “Great Firewall of China” is really intended to keep citizens from accessing information produced outside of China on such hot button topics like democracy and Tienanmen. The Great Firewall was not designed to keep information from flowing from Chinese citizens to the wider world, especially in real time.

Social media is having a big impact on both journalism and the wider world. While western news agencies struggle to get images out of China and Iran, Twitter and other social networks are providing a near limitless flow of information and media. In this case, a mainstream media story was combined with photos from a social network to tell a more complete story of the current unrest in China.

Rather than fear social media and other emerging Web technologies, news organizations should embrace these new technologies. In this case, the Globe and Mail was able to print five incredible photos that illustrate the upheaval and deadly violence in China. These photos would not be possible without social media, and the world would be poorer without these photos.

And while this is a journalism site, it’s pretty amazing to also see the impact that Twitter and other social media are having on totalitarian regimes like China and Iran. It may have been possible a few decades ago to keep unrest under wraps or at least limit its exposure to the world, but that is no longer the case. People have stories to tell and social media is emerging as the premier platform to tell individual stories, especially in the face of oppression and censorship.

It’s also worth noting that the Globe and Mail didn’t turn its nose up at non-professional photos on its front page. While the photos grabbed by cell phones aren’t award-winning quality, they are often more than adequate to tell a story. These photos are powerful not because of the technology behind them, but rather because of the subjects they capture and the stories they tell.

People all over the world are constantly taking photos and posting them to social media sites. News organizations need to learn how to harness this mass of information. While many of the photos are duds, there are plenty of gems.

To find these five gems, journalists at Reuters had to sift through many photos. As social media continues to proliferate, curation will become an increasingly important skill for journalists to have.