People's Daily Website, Xinhua, and even China Central Television (CCTV), which has been blamed for the blaze that destroyed its new complex Monday night, failed to issue the first headline on the breaking news.

It was an unidentified passerby who first captured the footage on a cell phone camera when hundreds of "extremely powerful" firecrackers triggered a disastrous fire that cost the life of a one fireman, caused at least seven injuries and a huge economic loss.

Rushing to the Internet, a Netizen nicknamed "Ground Coffee with Salt" uploaded the pictures onto a popular blog Website, www.tianya.cn.

The timestamp for the upload was 9:04 pm, 37 minutes after the blaze was reported to a local fire department.

Within minutes, the Website registered 369,625 hits and drew 1,724 comments on the accident, which almost tore down the 30-story and 159-meter-high building attached to the new CCTV tower.

The Beijing Fire Department officially blamed CCTV for ignoring hazard warnings and insisting on lighting hundreds of explosive and powerful firecrackers to celebrate the last night of the Lunar New Year festival season.

Before any mainstream media responded to the accident, "grassroots" media Websites such as Youtube, Flickr, Tudou and Hashtags.org were flooded with images, videos and blogs.

Young people are usually fed up with conventional media corporations. The CCTV building fire story was quickly shared on those more contemporary platforms on the Internet.

Even cell phone SMSs reacted to the incident much faster than mainstream media. A newspaper editor said she got the breaking news message at 9:19pm from a colleague whose apartment faces the building.

It was not the first case in which "personal media" got the upper hand over conventional mainstream competitors.

The first images of the ruined epicenter of the 8.0-magnitude Wenchuan earthquake on May 12 last year were rapidly shown on Flickr, significantly earlier than conventional media crews arrived at the spot.

Many individuals regularly updated their blogs and posted to online bulletin boards on major Chinese portals Sina or Sohu.

Personalized news

As a result, more personalized pieces are disseminated in the virtual arena, which by nature ignores boundaries of nations and cultural disparity among divergent people.

Twitter, a social networking Website that is heavily used by English speakers, attracted several posts on the CCTV blaze. David Poulson, associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University in the United States, said he recently thought of the journalistic dimensions of Twitter.

Impressed by the spreading civic engagement featured by Twitter and similar sites, Poulson said: "It might try tracking down tweeters of interesting comments for a traditional interview."

Min Dahong, a mass communication fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Tuesday in a telephone interview with Xinhua: "The power of grassroots media relies on its 'defiance' of the communication monopoly long held by conventional outlets and its capability of rapidly shaping public opinion on the Worldwide Web."

Major organized news outlets are trying to keep pace with citizen journalists in order to stay relevant in the interactive information age.

While the wire service Xinhua is investing a huge sum into building a multi-platform news giant, both the People's Daily, the ruling Communist Party's mouthpiece, and CCTV aim to expand their Internet presence, for more interactive journalism and Web video.

(The authors writers at Xinhua news agency.)

(Shanghai Daily February 13, 2009)