#Radiolondres challenged the French Elections

During the French elections, Twitter was the place to be ! As a French law, the article L. 52-2 from the electoral code, prohibits people to talk about the results before 20 p.m. the evening of elections rounds, tweetos found a trick to divert the law.

Marc Vasseur, a politician, asked his followers:

And answers did not wait too long to emerge:

Alain Bembelly, a man fond of Twitter, gave an idea of hashtag that will be accepted straightaway:  #Radiolondres. This idea comes from the Second Wolrd War when French resistants were emiting radio talks from London. Then, people established a code to understand each other.

Journalists, such as Guillaume Champeau, suggested some ideas with clear references to different politicians. For instance, “the custard is in oven”, refering to his nickname Flanby, means that François Hollande is winning. “The tomato is ripe” means Mélenchon because of the reference to the red color of his party emblem.

Then, the phenomenon was launched and people put #Radiolondres in all their tweets. The hashtag became the most used to refer to the election. Twittos largely prefered it to the hashtag Elysée.

Even pictures appear to describe what was going on. During the first election round, some unknown candidates did not get a lot of voices, such as Jacques Cheminade. People published funny picture to explain his situation.

The hashtag had such a sucess that many media around the world published a best-off of the tweets, even The New-York Times wrote something about it.

Furthemore, people made caricature to show that people were most likely to follow the elections on Twitter than on TY. Even if most of the people were both watching TV and following the tweets.

Most of the tweets annouced the defeat of Sarkozy and were retweeted thousand of times.

Almost every tweet bearing the hashtag Radiolondres were joking about the departure form the Elysée of Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife. Their prediction proved to be true because François Hollande replaced Nicolas Sarkozy at the head of the French government.

But, can Twittos be condemned for diverting the French election law ?

People could be fined up to 75’000 euros for revealing results of the elections. Indeed, ten inspectors were mobilized to check people’s tweets. But up to now none seems to bear the consequences of these tweets.

This shows that social media may challenge current laws. As asked a blogger in his post: is #Radiolondres a trick or a true democratic challenge ? and would government be able to adapt their laws to the new technologies ? Thus, if they want to have a control on what happen on the Web 2.0, they need to anticipate the changes… and quickly!

Stéphanie Giroud

Citizen journalists: are they useful?

“Put very simply, citizen journalism is when private individuals do essentially what professional reporters do – report information.”

That makes no doubt the participatory Web challenges professional media. People can comment, correct, and add details to journalist’s work; professional journalists are no more in there ivory tower being unattainable. 

As written on this hoarding, you see something and you report it to a great channel like CNN and, congratulations: you are a citizen journalist! Indeed, everybody has the possibility to become a citizen journalist above all if you are at the right place at the right moment. But, are citizen journalists just depending on traditional media and simply adding value on information or describing what they see?

The opinions are shared

On the one hand, many people think that “the citizen journalist provides invaluable information that can democratize media, as well as nations.” On the other hand, people think citizen journalists are simply quoting professional media or commenting events.

A blogger analysed, on the collective blog E-Media Tidbits, how citizen journalists deal with the Mumbai bombing in 2008. She draw the conclusion that citizen journalists were simply providing comments but no analyse on the event. Citizen journalists simply did not had an overview of the bombing and still rely on traditional media to get information.

Are citizen journalists simply commentators? Like this video will show you, the debate between traditional media and citizen journalism is still burning.

But… do professional journalists use their rival’s work or look down upon it?

“You can’t depend on citizen journalists. I’ve got 12 reliable contributors from a community of 60,000″, asserted an american editor. Another editor confesses that they use some citizen-generated content. Just adding that they always need to complete more or less the articles.

Some journalists even do not understand why these people are called citizen journalists. “I’m also a citizen doing journalism!”, exclaimed recently Edwy Plenel, chief editor and founder of Mediapart. Finally, should these people be simply called citizen of a democracy, exercising their right of expression?

Citizen journalists’ defense: we “allow marginalized people to reclaim their voices, to tell their otherwise silenced stories firsthand“. With have seen it with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements, new technologies help new topics to pop up. By using user generated content, people can talk about new topics challenging the agenda setting of Media.

According to citizen journalists, they may be considered as a rival to traditional media, helping people to get other points of view on news and to reach new topics. Thus, they claimed to follow the principles of journalism by giving a voice to marginalized people, but do they also follow the ethcial principles required to get a press pass?

More and more people are using technologies to express their opinions. What do you think: citzen journalists are they useful in a democracy or should only traditional Media play the role of gatekeepers?