Can "Occupy Wall Street", the protest of the boys of Zuccotti Park in New York, reveal something about the future of journalism? Maybe yes. When people take to the streets, the papers tend to think it's just yet another time someone is angry at someone else and that it's not worth worrying too much about. The New York Times waited six days before publishing an article on the protest, followed reluctantly by American and European newspapers. Since there was no recognized leader to interview or press office to contact, the new movement was initially treated as a kind of circus, full of acrobats and clowns comically trying to get around police regulations. More than a month after the protest began and after it spread to dozens of other American cities, Zuccotti Park is now starting to affect the editorial page as well. With a guilty delay.
The New York Observer was the first to notice that something important was about to begin, making its website the global point of reference for the new movement. And with great success: among the most read stories, four out of five concern Occupy Wall Street. According to the Pew New Media Index, only Nokia mobile phones and the presidential election are more debated in American blogs, and on Google News contacts regarding Zuccotti Park are double those of the Tea Party.
According to Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Occupy Wall Street is a great opportunity for web journalism, because it has all the necessary ingredients: it is a movement of young people who communicate on Twitter or Facebook, it is followed by traditional media in the wrong way and it evolves continuously, generating new topics for debate. The Observer's Foster Kamer described it like a car window breaking: a single small impact causes thousands of different cracks. From the protesters, attention shifts to the police, Wall Street managers, government tax policy, the presidential race, the celebrities who visit Zuccotti Park, the other cities involved in the protest, with a continuous flowering of themes that slow of traditional newspapers struggles to resort.
In a couple of months, we will read in the New York Times and the Washington Post the analyzes that will make us understand how important this movement has been in representing the protest of the 99% who own a minimal part of the income against the 1% who control the wealth national. But to witness what's happening, there's nothing better than the web.
