Blogging and mobile phones with built-in digital cameras reinforced a slowly growing trend of citizen journalism. During the tsunami this winter the trend really picked up speed since the fastest and most reliable sources for information was blogs in several levels which each collected, valuated and referred other sources of information.
The next step is of course to melt together citizen journalism with other distributed information gathering systems like the open collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia.
To watch this in real life check out the entry for the tornado Katrina which is currently coming in over New Orleans.
This kind of spontanous collaborative information systems is here to stay and will definitively be a threat to other news providing services.
Trends to note: citizen journalism, collaborative information systems