Future of war reporting?

[joe_turner]

Hello
I'm interested to know what other journalists think about the future of war correspondents? I recently went to an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North which suggested technology could mark the end of war reporting as we know it. Do you think citizen journalism is the future or is it still important to have a reporter on location?

[lyte86]

Only if vast numbers of people are prepared to spend hours each day manually scouring Twitter, blogs and YouTube videos, for scraps of information of unknown reliability.  The other downside, of course, is that have-a-go hacks can't pull together strands from many locations to present the 'big picture' in the same way as a traditional news network.

Many amateurs are also ignorant of the legal risks involved in publishing, and a lot seem to blithely assume that you can say anything you like.  I once saw a murder trial judge have to explicitly order idiots in the public gallery stop tweeting legal argument that was being heard in the absence of the jury.  They plainly had no idea about common law contempt of court.  Others seem to believe copyright is just a little (c) on DVD boxes, and libel seems to be equally misunderstood.