Twenty years ago, the world was transfixed by an image of courageous resistance -- a lone young man standing in the road before a column of Chinese army tanks moving into Tiananmen Square to crush the students and others who'd gone there to demonstrate for reform.
Since Saturday, the global community has been similarly gripped by the tragic photos and video of Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old Iranian woman shot to death on the streets of Tehran while on her way to one of the protests over that country's disputed presidential election.
The most famous of the photos of the Chinese hero was taken by Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener. Other memorable images of the standoff were shot by photo journalists who were in Beijing working for Newsweek, Reuters and the Magnum photo agency. In Iran, by contrast, we still don't know who took the stills, video and audio recordings of the dying young woman, who has become known to tens of millions simply as "Neda," because the images and sound were collected on the cellphones of her fellow demonstrators and surreptitiously transmitted over the Internet to the rest of the world.
In those differing attributions, we can begin to see the future of foreign news reporting.
Two things of immense consequence have occurred since the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square: For economic reasons, far fewer Western journalists are dispatched to cover international crises, like the June 12 Iranian election; at the same time, millions of people around the world -- and particularly in countries with large, well-educated young urban populations, like China and Iran -- have joined the new media revolution. The Internet, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and cellphones with the ability to text-message and to record and transmit images have become interwoven with their daily lives.
The Iranian resistance is the first popular movement to present itself to the world, in significant part, through new media. But while it's true that something new and unexpected is happening here, the process hasn't gone as either many traditional journalists or the Web's theoretical triumphalists ever foresaw.
As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government and its thuggish clerical allies have choked off more and more of the Western media's access to events, thousands of Iranians armed with cellphones and social network connections have taken the reporters' and photographers' place. However, instead of the emergence of full-blown "citizen journalists" -- the ideal of Internet enthusiasts -- you've seen thousands of ordinary Iranians on the scene feeding information and images to other media, both traditional and nontraditional, much in the manner of volunteer stringers.
