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"It's burst into flames and it's falling, it's crashing . . . Oh, the humanity!"
Nearly 70 years ago, an American radio reporter named Herbert Morrison uttered these words when a German zeppelin called the Hindenburg crashed at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. Morrison's report for radio station WLS in Chicago captured the horror of the tragedy, but wasn't available to listeners until the following day, when NBC rebroadcast Morrison's recording to a national audience.
This week, the crash of a single-engine plane into a New York apartment building gripped a city and a nation in real-time. Just five years before, many of the same television viewers had watched in horror as the events of September 11, 2001 unfolded. While TV hosts speculated about the cause of the plane crash that killed Yankees' pitcher Cory Lidle, a cameraman from the Fox News Channel quietly captured the scene on his Palm Treo smartphone.
Scott Wilder's work isn't the first time that a network has used live footage from a mobile phone. Citizen journalists used camera phones to capture images of the London transit bombings and the South Asian tsunami long before news crews arrived. Still, Herbert Morrison would be proud – and amazed.
Steve Melito - The Y Files
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Re: Tragedy and Technology
