Two weeks after the contested election in Iran, David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun spoke of the ground breaking changes that had taken place in journalism. Parisa Khosravi, senior vice president of international newsgathering for CNN Worldwide was quoted as saying," In my 22 years, I have never seen antyhing like this -it is amazing the flood of information that's coming in. The China Quake and Mombai bombing wern't even close to this"
BBC was broadcasting out of London via satellite to Iran and Afghanistan, and was doing several daily interactive programs in which people could text, email and phone in so there was no shortage of people willing to participate on the day of the election.
An explosion of the use of user-generated content was created, with thousands and thousands of files, stills and videos being sent every day from people in Iran with mobile phones and cameras.
News was truly a two-way process.
This doesn’t mean that the journalist’s role was gone. In fact, BBC journalists were called to account more and more since they have to source and analyze the material but it did mean that they had huge potential to cover things as they happened.
For BBC, the main problem was that you could not know the accuracy of the material. There were pressures from both sides about what was being said. It was largely unfiltered and had to be contextualized by the journalists of BBC Persian for the rest of BBC.