So what did you make of the coverage of the VA disaster yesterday? Did you see a tragedy? That’s what was portrayed. But behind it was actually an emerging network, the birth of yet another citizen journalism network. Incidents like these, which are sad and horrible and I hope are few and far between, are also usually the catalyst for networks of people to organize on the Web with the goal to help inform others about unfolding events. The tragedy for these groups (aside from the very real and human tragedy of course) is that there are no set tools they can use (out of the box) to help organize their coverage. And that’s what we are trying to figure out at Assignment Zero.

Poynter put together a series of links, a good part of it them were citizen journalism, facebook, cnn’s cj initiative, etc.

“This morning’s shooting at Virginia Tech is destined to become one of those cornerstone events in citizen journalism and participatory media. When news breaks in a location where nearly everyone has a camera-equipped cell phone, and where Internet connectivity abounds, people on the spot will be supplying as much coverage as news organizations — if not more.

On the VA tech site, students were filing their own first person coverage under “around campus”

This one was filed while a student was under lockdown yesterday morning.

Traditional journalism online has failed at covering this event. Newsvine (where I first saw the breaking news), Gather, Netscape etc - they were giving it its due. That’s where I wanted to turn to find out what was happening.

In some respects this was an important moment in citizen journalism. Of course, the Washington Post, the NYT, etc were doing their best to cover it. And now that the story has broke, I imagine they’ll do the best job. But as it was breaking, a savvy reader would have gone to the darker corners of the Net to find the most relevant information.

This was a dividing moment between the online pubs of yesteryear and the networked ones especially the student network from VA tech.

There was, of course, criticism of the citizen journalism coverage:

“In the weeks to come there will be considerable discussion about the on-scene coverage of this event, and I’m sure there will be plenty of “pro-citizen journalism” analysis. But I also hope there’s some serious debate about the merits of citizen journalism.”

So what does this all mean?

The blogosphere has proved it can fact check itself pretty well. It can also cover breaking news. The problem is, it requires a certain level of organizing before people from the MSM will give it any credence for the flexibility it has.

And until the blogosphere massively organizes itself around topics it will remain skeptic. But it isn’t without the potential for an answer — a single blog is only as reliable as the person behind it — just like a freelance journalist.

But when a freelance journalist gets a writing gig for the New York Times, their credibility soars — as a result of the prestige of that organizations.

And I think a single blogger will be able to do the same in the future — by teaming up with networks of bloggers — once those networks are able to organize themselves.

And somehow I brought it back to Assignment Zero.