The new ‘new journalism’ (or how the camera phone replaced the reporter’s notebook)

The world is abuzz with the grim camera-phone video of Saddam Hussein being executed. While most television networks have not been showing the video, it has found an immense audience in the Internet, so that the execution video is now the most popular and most searched item on the web. (Checkout Technorati to see what I mean.)

The Saddam execution also gave us a glimpse of what journalists can do with a video taken by a camera phone. In John F. Burns’s terrific story in the New York Times, the video was the main hook. Thus, in a way, the reporter’s notebook has been substituted — at least in this case — with the camera phone.

[tags]saddam, saddam hussein, saddam video, saddam hanging, saddam execution, saddam execution video[/tags]