Journalism and Emotion. Stephen Jukes

      User-generated content has also allowed consumers of news to see news they would only have been able to read about in the past. Passers-by capturing events on a mobile phone simply by dint of being present (sometimes termed ‘accidental journalism’ or ‘citizen witnessing’) has transformed audience expectations. There is, of course, a long history of bystanders witnessing news, not least the legendary Abraham Zapruder frames of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (discussed in detail in Chapter 7). But the first cases of such images in the digital era can be traced back to the Asian tsunami of December 2004 when holidaymakers captured the devastating impact of tidal waves from hotel balconies. In the United Kingdom, the pivotal moment came in July 2005 when the London underground system was bombed. Camera crews had no access, but passengers caught up in the attacks started sending mobile phone pictures to news organisations. Helen Boaden, who was the BBC’s Director of News at the time, identified the attacks as a watershed and ‘the point at which the BBC knew that news gathering had changed forever’ (2008). In a BBC blog on the changing news landscape and July 7 attacks, she wrote: