What a difference a week and a sizeable terrorist outrage can make to the public image of camera phones. Until now, camera and video phones have been associated only with pop culture, prurience and paedophilia. When they first arrived a couple of years ago, some of London’s trendiest nightclubs banned them in an effort to mollify their celebrity clientele. A Home Office task force was even briefed with examining the threat to child safety, even though there were no actual arrests of paedophiles armed with mobile phones.

Now all those perverts and nosy parkers have morphed into intrepid “citizen reporters”. Minutes after last week’s bombings, newsrooms were being deluged with e-mailed pictures offering every conceivable perspective on the attacks. On the day of the bombs alone, the BBC received about 1,000 phone photos from the public. On the internet, more gruesome pictures were circulating. Citizen reporters were not only proving themselves useful to news editors but to the authorities; the Metropolitan Police appealed for the public to send in any mobile phone images that might help with its inquiries.

But are we really witnessing the birth of a new era of journalism, one in which the public collaborate with news outlets to report the news? Only a couple of weeks ago the idea of the citizen journalist seemed a trifle worthy, the province of media studies lecturers. The idea first surfaced in South Korea in 2000, when an online newspaper called OhmyNews had the inexpensive idea of soliciting most of its content from its readers. Launched with the slogan “Every citizen is a reporter”, the site was soon garlanded with awards for its originality.

Now that the citizen can be drafted in not only as writer but as cameraman, citizen reporting will become much more widespread. Even before the events of last week, the use of handheld video cameras was forcing futurologists to rub their goatee beards thoughtfully. What, wondered Howard Rheingold, the author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, if the new mobile technologies could enable entire populations to engage in “peer-to-peer” journalism? Imagine, he said, “the impact of the Rodney King video multiplied by the people power of Napster?”

Last week’s events have brought that kind of people power closer. But amid all this talk about democratising the news, we should retain a dose of scepticism. Without the relationship of trust between reporter and editor, how is anyone to authenticate what we are seeing through the grainy eye of a mobile phone? Unscrupulous news outlets may see citizen reporters as an excuse to slacken the editorial process and penny-pinch on reporting budgets. And rubberneckers everywhere will have a convenient new call to arms — let me through, they’ll cry, I’m a citizen reporter.

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