Media companies have embraced the idea of citizen journalism for decades. Little research, however, systematically explores how people use mobile smartphones to engage in acts of reporting.1 Bridging theory between social and media ritual, this project explores how a crowd used mobile smartphones to report on an organized live event where content submissions were immediately shared on billboard-size screens. A group of interdisciplinary faculty and students built a content management platform that captured texts, tweets, and photos from a crowd of over 30,000 people at a university campus event in May 2011. This paper summarizes the design of the system, as well as the patterns of content contributions, and situates the results in conversation with research on citizen journalism and mobile technology. Results suggest a platform like the one piloted here can prolong engagement at community events. Furthermore, results describe media “super users” whose exceptional engagement could be harnessed for further mobilization or even monetization.
