Insensitive journalism

The speed of media reporting is changing every week. 10 years ago we often never heard of these crashes, or only got info days after the event. Rider Down is part of this media storm, as we have seen over recent weeks there are several grey lines between forum threads, tweets, personal blogs, news blogs and traditional media. There are no rules, apart from the personal judgement of the person posting the item/photo. The more of this we see the less sensitive we become and it is too easy to shock other people without realising it. I went past Old st yesterday, the photos could have been worse.
I am gutted that so much of this new media focusses on cycling = risk in an unbalanced way. People think things are getting worse because of the fast coverage, actually things are much much better than 10 years ago.

The insensitive journalism thing is a bit of a weird one, isn't it? because surely one of the reasons to post the rider down threads is to raise awareness of the dangerous situations cyclists find themselves in on the roads. Most of us are already well aware of this - so the use in informing the wider populace is probably more important. This is where journalists come in, but when they do, we get all uncomfortable with it. That's not to say that in recent incidents the journos in question weren't bang out of order. If we're serious about communicating with ordinary people and changing attitudes to road use, then we have to accept a certain degree of risk that we will occasionally be misquoted, ill-used and plagiarised by more slovenly journalists.

That's not to say that people shouldn't kick off when they do.