Today after the elections in Iran heavy clashes happend on the streets of Tehran. Thousands of supporters of the reformist candidate Mirhossein Mousavi demonstrated on the streets and having fights with the police. Reason was that president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected. That this happend might not be such a big surprise, also while Mousavi called himself the new president last night, even when the result of the elections were quite clear. What was way more interesting for me was the way i got the information about the clashes. Even before the news websites on the net were reporting it on the web, flickr-streams were posted on the facebook by friends.

The way information is going around the world has changed a lot through websites like twitter, facebook, myspace or blogs, giving everyone the chance to share nearly everything with the world within seconds and bring it to a big audience. What is totally missing is something like a filter and a estimation, what classic journalism normally provides. And this new ways to share information is also putting pressure on the journalists to be even faster. When the first information you get of the crashed plane on Hudson river is on Twitter- by a guy sitting in the plane, it’s hard for journalism. But it is to question if it is the right thing to do kind of a live translation on news websites of the Cairo speech of Obama, with all the risks of unfiltered information, mistakes and so on. Journalism in my opinion has to be two things at first point: 1. It has to be neutral and 2. It has to compare different sources to keep this neutrality. The faster and faster way to provide information with the pressure of all this new ways to share information by anyone, seems to be a danger for classic journalism. But all this might not be new.

Coming back to todays event, we could see something interesting about it. Looking at this flickr-stream i was impressed by the sheer number of pictures till i realized that they were by different photographers, That might be against the guidelines of flickr, but nothing too special. What was way more interesting was the owner of the flickr account. It was candidate Mousavi (at least officially). It doesn’t really matter if you call it propaganda or not, but it shows what is possible today to build opinions when something like that is going around the world faster than any article by a journalist. Maybe journalism will change in the next years a lot from providing news to focusing on another core business: to filter the information and estimate it, when it’s not the problem anymore to get the information.

More about the clashes from the Reuters agency here.