Amateurs scorch the pros at hotel fire

Following a fire in a liquor store at a well known Brisbane hotel, customers and passers-by began snapping away with their digital cameras and camera phones. "There was a line-up of people standing all along the edge of the freeway taking pictures", reports one passer-by. The local press (Courrier-Mail) was later inundated with photos of the fire by citizen reporters.

"Where once there would have been plenty of witnesses but not much in the way of a permanent record, much of yesterday's fire is stored away in camera memory cards", reports News.com.

It will be interesting to see if the Courrier-Mail illustrates their story with some of these citizens' camphone shots (it's not online at the time of the posting of this story or else I just can't find it).

And just for the record, it was in February 2003, that the first picture taken by a citizen reporter armed with a camera phone made front page news (in Japan's largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun). A passerby photographed a bank erupting into flames. cf Japan Media Review.

emily | 5:19 PM | Citizens as Camera Phone Reporters |
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