Mr. Shanbhag, who lives in Boston but happened to be in Mumbai when the attacks began on Wednesday, described the gunfire on his Twitter feed — the “thud, thud, thud” of shotguns and the short bursts of automatic weapons — and uploaded photos to his personal blog.
Mr. Shanbhag, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said he had not heard the term citizen journalism until Thursday, but now he knows that is exactly what he was doing. “I felt I had a responsibility to share my view with the outside world,” Mr. Shanbhag said in an e-mail message on Saturday morning.
Are his updates news? Should they be considered a factual record of what happened? Can major news outlets use his work as a source?
These are the questions journalists are trying to answer around the world right now. With the emergence of “always-on, everywhere” news, reporters need “always-on, everywhere” sources.