Big Storm Hits Sydney: Photo Fallen Tree Blocking Street
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This example shows why bloggers with camera phones are better placed to report on local news stories than “old media” like the print media, radio and TV.
It also shows that it’s useful to have a tradesman who owns a large petrol chainsaw living on your street 
and that unexpected events show which neighbours are willing to help their community out.
6:30pm: Huge electrical storm comes through my suburb with torrential rain
6:45pm: Half a gum tree falls over and blocks the whole street
7:00pm: I come out of the house and see the fallen tree. One of our neighbours has a chainsaw so he starts cutting limbs off the fallen tree and other people including me help to remove them from the road
7:20pm: Road cleared, someone calls the State Emergency Service so they know about the fallen tree limbs needing to be cleared from the roadside. Cars can now drive on the road again
7:30pm: I walk home, dry off and write this article with a photo I took on my Nokia 6300 camera phone
TIME ELAPSED FROM TREE FALL TO PUBLISHING THIS: 45 min
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Nice bit of journalism Neerav. You and the neighbours did a great job and I’m sure the SES appreciate that your street is no longer an “urgent” matter.
EDITOR: Yes i’m sure the State Emergency Service (SES) is going to be really busy tonight
Cool! I’ll have to watch for ‘local news’ for my area too! My phone is usually with me. We had half a day of rain in Melbourne yesterday which is probably newsworthy considering the drought we’ve been going through.
Great reporting!
the strom looks to be very powerful , well u did a job of a good citizen, well done.
Well done Neerav,
Yes I think you may be right - the face of traditional news reporting may be changing.
Keep up the good work.
Markmcg
“Old Media” does sometimes make use of readers contributions, very wisely. For example, the BBC site published many reader submitted photos of the floods in UK last year. The BBC would not have been able to take many of this type themselves of course, unless they used canoes!
EDITOR: that’s true and AFAIK the same applied for photos of the london bombings
Look like you were blogger-on-spot for this so to say. Like the line about bloggers with camera phones vs “old media”. User submitted photos about “non-major” (or in some cases like London bombings even real big news stories), local events surely improved quality of coverage a lot. Think that especially goes for newspapers, particularly smaller, more locally orientated ones, as their photographers, simply can’t be everywhere.
Nice bit of journalism, and also it’s good that communities still help each other despite the “going to hell in a hand-basket” theory. We’ve been having a lot of powerful storms the past few years in the Pacific Northwest, too.