Osama Bin Laden media overdose

I think every person with a brain has already had this debate: yeah, we're happy a terrorist was killed, but isn't it wrong to celebrate a death? Does this mean anything for the war? This and that--all over the news, and the op-eds, and the seminar discussions.

I wanted to go on another tangent though. Yesterday I learned about Sohaib Athar--the civilian who lived in Abbottabad, Pakistan (you know, where Bin Laden was caught) who was Tweeting about the raid unknowingly as it happened. It literally took me a minute or two to process that when I heard it before rushing to a computer.

Sohaib Athar, @ReallyVirtual tweeted the following on May 1st, I'm assuming late at night because Twitter doesn't provide the time:

ReallyVirtual Sohaib Athar

Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).

1 May Favorite Retweet Reply

ReallyVirtual Sohaib Athar

Go away helicopter - before I take out my giant swatter :-/

1 May Favorite Retweet Reply

ReallyVirtual Sohaib Athar

A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S

1 May Favorite Retweet Reply

The tweets continued until he read the news and realized what was going on. The media frenzy fired on him and he even had to create a FAQ about his "tweets" and the legitimacy of his site. Though I still remain a bit skeptical about this, the issue/concept of immediacy is what really strikes me. Literally, before I went to bed on Sunday, checked my e-mail and saw NPR Update: Osama Bin Laden is Dead, Sohaib Athar had already "reported" on it first hand in one way or another. I agree with Google when it says "The Web is what you make of it".

So my question is--is this journalism? Is Sohaib Athar now considered as legit as a Pulitzer Prize Photographer who puts his life at risk for the news? But wait--he didn't know he was reporting on anything so drastically important. Does it still count as journalism?

I've come to a conclusion about journalism--it's not something that can be studied, it can just be practiced. Willingly or unwillingly we are all journalists on a daily basis. We are constantly reporting, googling, researching, tweeting, updating on any given subject that interest us. For this guy, well, he thought he was just reporting on neighborhood occurrences, when in fact he was tweeting about the most important capture of the decade. Wow.