The Most Striking Still Pictures and Video of the London Terror Attacks Did Not Come From the Professional Media, But Instead from The Horrified Targets Using Their Mobile Phones

Philip Stone July 11, 2005

When the bombs hit the three London Underground sites last week Londoners knew it was no use trying to use their phones to contact the outside world because there are no signals within the underground system. But that didn’t stop them from using their phones, and many became on-the-spot video journalists.

As darkness hit the trains after the explosions, mobile phones were first used to shine their dim light within the carriages. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. And then the users started capturing via their still picture and video capabilities the horrors that had befallen them.

Once they had been led out of the tunnels and to safety those who escaped harm and also the walking wounded started sending their pictures and videos to their friends and family and they in turn to the media, and they also posted their output on several web sites already in existence for the public to share any photos and videos, not just news.

Thus it was that on television stations and web sites around the world there suddenly appeared some of the starkest pictures and video of what happened. And it was those pictures that truly brought home the terror of it all. Newspapers around the world featured many of those stills on their front pages.

The video quality was very poor, showing the tell-tell signs of over compression and other faults, but for television editors it was a simple editorial decision to still show it – for such a story video even of that poor quality was better than no video at all. Still pictures were quite vivid. Most phones now have a flash and carry detail of 1 million pixels.

Even at the bus explosion, out in the open in central London, it was the mobile phone pictures that first showed, close-up, what had happened. By the time the professional media photographers had arrived the police were already on hand and stopped them getting very close for security concerns. Thus the most striking pictures were from the amateurs.

Mobile phones were used to similar affect during the Asian Tsunami last year. Some of the most horrific pictures came from video cameras – thus better quality – but also from pictures taken by mobile phones.

British media web sites, learning from the Tsunami coverage, quickly opened their web sites to the public to contribute eyewitness pictures and video of the terror attacks. But proving again how the web becomes inundated on a major news story, the BBC’s web site crashed soon after the explosions and it took a few hours to get it back, offering far fewer features in order to save bandwidth.

There are more than 1 billion mobile phones scattered around the world, and this year some 100 million camera phones are forecast to be sold in Europe alone. Mobile phones already have about an 80% penetration within the UK and it is thought the majority of those have picture capabilities. Camera phones have become so popular they are said to outsell digital cameras by a 4:1 ratio.

The London usage of the picture and video capabilities of mobile phones reinforced growing research that indicates that the real “killer” application for mobile phones is peer to peer transmissions of audio, still pictures and video between friends and family. News organization look to the mobiles as a way of spreading their services (let alone the public sending them news items), as do music download companies and the like, and that will surely happen to some degree, but what people really want to do is to share their own experiences with others.

This was proven recently in Japan, probably the world’s leading country for mobile applications, where Berg Research found that mobile users were not very much interested in video telephony or in downloading commercial video; what they really wanted was to be able to transmit their own audio, still pictures and video to their friends and family.

It was remarkable that so many pictures and video actually got out in the London tragedy as quickly as they did.  All of the mobile networks quickly became overloaded because not only were people checking up on one another, but also because under a longstanding action plan by the emergency services that took over bandwidth on networks for their own use, meaning there was less service available to the general public. Mobile operators said it was their biggest day in history – more than 1 million callers trying to get through.

Those who couldn’t use their phones resorted to email. MessageLabs, which monitors email traffic, said the number of emails doubled during the day and that in the hour of the explosion – between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m -- . the rate of emails soared to more than 1 million.

For global media, this is the second major wake-up call (the first being the Tsunami) that the general public now have the means and desire to become part of the coverage of major events. Some media organizations still beg off involving the public because they don’t know how much one can “trust” the source, but those stark pictures of the London Underground trains with windows smashed and people forming uniform lines in the tunnels along the track to get out could have come from no other source. And no picture was more dramatic.

And it is not just on the national and international level that this lesson should be learned.  Newspaper web sites are often the most popular news sites on the web; newspapers worry about the popularity of their sites, however, because they feel they are losing print circulation to their own web activities.

And yet if a newspaper considers that people want to use their phones to transmit SMS, still pictures, and even video then what better way to converge with one’s own print edition? The web is perfect for that type of coverage and it is obvious from the London happenings that the world at large wants to see that type of “personal” coverage. 

It doesn’t have to be a terrible tragedy like the London bombings to attract this type of web coverage. It can be the local school’s graduation ceremonies, sporting events, and the like – whatever is of interest to the local community.

And if the local/regional newspaper doesn’t handle this need then there are others that will. For the London bombing, sites such as moblog.co.uk and Flickr.com, set up to share video and still pictures, were being heavily used to share the story in pictures and video. One picture on moblog was accessed more than 45,000 times.

The lesson is clear: If local/regional newspapers don’t involve their readers directly within their web sites then there will always be someone else willing to step into the breech.

The public wants to get involved. The media should embrace them!