“The Tremor in the Air”
A widely held belief about new media and traditional foreign correspondence suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. On the one hand, a foreign correspondent steeped in the best practices of our profession heads off to cover a war, revolution, or natural disaster in some far-flung place, notebook in hand, ready to bear witness. On the other, a pajama-clad blogger pontificates from an armchair in Maryland about events thousands of miles away. It’s all at his fingertips: the flood of news, images, and video captured by citizen journalists on the ground. Why would you need a correspondent to be there as an eyewitness too?
Well, because, “No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smoulder, or the cadence of a scream,” Roger Cohen argued in a June 2009 column for the New York Times, making an eloquent appeal for traditional foreign correspondence.2 Cohen had just been ousted from Iran, from where he had continued to report on the violent aftermath of the presidential election even after he was stripped of his press card.
“No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night,” Cohen wrote. “No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt.”
No doubt Cohen argued a strong point about being there on the scene, recording everything firsthand. But now, using digital technology, there is another way to grasp the granular and authentic feel of the streets. This process uses new online tools, not to circumvent the most sacred principles of journalism, but to advance them–especially when reporting on authoritarian countries like Iran, Ethiopia, North Korea, or the United Arab Emirates, to name just a few. New media allows journalists to cast their nets wider than ever in some of the most underreported places in the world.
At Tehran Bureau we gather information from ordinary people, charting the trends in society from the ground up. By remaining anonymous and going under the radar, we can penetrate a closed society whose members have largely withdrawn into tight-knit units. We operate without official access, beyond the controls and spin the government uses to manipulate or influence journalists in traditional Tehran Bureaus. Thus, new media allows us to do the kind of independent reporting that is virtually impossible for a physical news bureau inside Iran.