THE recent tragic events in Haiti made grievous reading.

Words, images and spurious news reports began to get through to the UK on 12 January 2010 at around 10.30pm.

In no uncertain terms, they described a devastating earthquake, striking at a magnitude of 7.0 on the scale – the worst in Haiti’s recent history.

Abject devastation, collapsed homes and government buildings, screaming children and dead bodies lying in the streets were just a few of the scenes arriving on our screens hours later.

And this information, because of the immediacy of the internet, arrived much quicker than in previous disasters, thus enabling a more rapid response by charities and aids organisations here in the UK and the USA.

What was interesting from a media analysis perspective wasn’t just the speed of the footage delivered to our screens from people on the ground – nor it’s ability to motivate people into action. It was primarily it’s amateurish quality.

These hashed-together reports and images – sent via mobile phone video messaging, Twitter and Blogs – at the outset weren’t from strategically located BBC news correspondents delivering VT from the scene.

The footage we saw, prior to the professionals moving in, was shot by ordinary citizens, unprofessional ‘journalists’, in the strictest sense, documenting events happening around them.

In this sense, the Haitian earthquake was possibly the first major disaster to portray the power and collective sway of what many are calling ‘citizen journalism’, and revealed a burgeoning new trend quite remarkably changing the media industry – collaboration.

Collaboration – literally, a working-together of everyday unofficial publishers (people with a camera and an internet connection)  and professional journalists – is happening in newsrooms around the globe.

Obviously, there are important considerations to take into account when using unchecked media content – questions of legality, authenticity and so on.

But the reality in today’s information economy is that people want – and are able to – be part of the conversation, thanks to affordable technology. To deny them a voice is to become irrelevant in the wider, displaced hierarchy of the blogosphere.

When resources and staffing infrastructures are also at an all-time low in many news organisations, the pro’s of collaboration effectively outweigh the cons. And the ecology of news is, of course, diversifying out of all control.

In light of such developments, many media commentators and news business strategists, such as Jeff Jarvis at the CNYU school, and the guys at Growthspur believe the actual role the journalist plays in the community has to be reviewed entirely.

That’s a topic I’ll blog about next time.