A video interview with a popular blogger/ citizen journalist fom India which focuses on the nuances of citizen reporting during a crisis situation with special emphasis on the recent Mumbai attacks.

We got a preview of how important citizen journalism is likely to become in developing countries when social media played a leading role in covering the China earthquake and the Mumbai terror attack.

'If you can find a way to filter the occasional hot image from everything else, [then citizen journalism has a future]. But the wider you seek and the more you solicit, the more resources you're going to have to throw at the filtering "challenge". So I think the suck-from-wherever approach has to be the way to go rather than a dedicated agency like Scoopt.'

While it's a no-brainer to say (as I did endlessly) that whenever news breaks there's likely to be a punter with a cameraphone on the scene before a pro, the chances of that punter already being a member of your agency, or even having heard of it, are vanishingly small.