Citizen Journalists Win Polk Award for Footage of Neda Agha-Soltan

Yesterday, Long Island University announced the winners of the 2009 George Polk Award, an annual honor for excellence in journalism. And in addition to the regular heavy-hitters, they also recognized the anonymous men and women that filmed the death of Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan.

This marks the first time that citizen journalists have received such a traditional, industry-recognized honor. And as a result, it’s a really freaking big deal.

Citizen journalism is a burgeoning subset of the craft that, in actuality, has been around since Pheidippides ran to Athens to announce the victory of the Greeks. Such “laymen” have recorded some of the most raw, paramount pieces of history, like the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, the 9/11 attacks, but it’s exploded in recent years thanks to accessible technology and the explosion of online social services like Twitter.

And if the Iranian protests truly ushered in a whole new flock of new age citizen journalists, then the video of Neda’s death is their shepherd. The bloody footage became, as the Polk awards put it, a “rallying point for the reformist opposition in Iran,” and traditional journalist had a one in five million chance of getting this footage.

I think this video deserves the Polk award, but as a whole, citizen journalism is a contentious subject amongst those who have built a careers out of something these people do on a whim. They argue that citizen journalists cannot possibly understand the nuances of ethics and bias, that simply holding a video camera does not make you a journalist, and that recognizing their validity simply steals jobs from professionals.

But then again, citizen journalists can capture moments that real journalists simply can’t, as we recently saw in Haiti. Perhaps this simply spells change–the demise of the news wire and the rise of paid, trained agreggators whose job is to find those citizen pieces and help them go viral.

Nobody knows, and personally, I’m excited to stick around and find out. The winning video is posted below, so check it out and make up your own mind. But a warning: this footage is incredibly graphic.

Neda Agha Soltan Shot in Iran
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