To Help or Document: The Citizen Journalists' Dilemma

The New York Post’s decision to publish an image of a man on the New York City subway tracks moments before the impact that led to his death has become a lightning rod for controversy. Why did the Post run the photo? Why didn't freelance photographer R. Umar Abbasi, the man who took the photo, save Ki-Suck Han? I want to know these things, too, but I have a very different question. What would you do?

Abbasi’s predicament may seem a world away from you, but it’s not. You, you smartphone-toting citizen journalist, stand just as much a chance of being a witness to history and horror as today’s garden-variety journalist.

Consider this: Abbasi is described as a photojournalist. It’s his job to get the story. It’s what he was doing when Han was pushed. He says his goal was not to capture Han’s predicament, but to use his flash to alert the oncoming train of the impending accident. One of those photos did end up in The Post, so he was also, clearly, doing the job of a journalist.

Abbasi's situation is not uncommon. Photojournalists are all over the world, in hot and not-so-hot zones getting the story, sometimes at risk of their own lives. If there’s a situation where they can help, they sometimes grab the photo first and then help, because that act takes a second and will likely not worsen the outcome. In reality, helping one person won’t have as great an impact as the image, which could motivate millions to help or cry out in anger.

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kevin Carter captured a photo of a starving Sudanese child being eyed hungrily by a nearby vulture, the New York Times reportedly received hundreds of inquiries about the fate of that girl. Carter's decision to document instead of help may have weighed heavily on him (he later committed suicide).

Clearly, even for photojournalists, the choice is not always obvious. In a lengthy blog post on The National Press Photographers Association, John Long, Ethics Chair for the NPPA, writes:

"Some say the photographer has no right to participate in the story he or she is covering, that the photographer must remain objective, merely observe and not become a participant. I do not believe it is possible to be totally objective. Your very presence at the scene changes the event you are covering to some degree."

What about you, the budding citizen journalists? As New York Times reporter David Carr noted near the end of his piece on The Post's decision to run the photo: “In an era when most people have a camera in their hand or pocket, mass shootings will be memorialized on cellphone videos and ubiquitous security cameras will dish up fresh horrors."

He's right, of course. No one is paying us to cover news or to be objective. Yet there we are with smartphones in our pockets and in our hands.

The oft-heard phrase, "We’re all citizen journalists, now," may not be empirically true, but there’s some evidence to support the notion. Many major news stories hinge on media grabbed by random folks with their mobile phone. It’s not always dramatic, but often the photo or video tells the tale in ways a late-arriving professional journalist could not. The most memorable recent example may be Janis Krums' photos of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson, with passengers lined up on the wing.

That iconic image turned Krums into an instant, albeit temporary, celebrity and since everything ended so splendidly, you would think there’d be little hand-wringing about if Krums could have helped.

A few years ago Krums told me, “[I] was on Twitter at the time we were pulling up to the plane; [it] was the easiest way to send out a public message about the crash."

People asked him if he was worried others would think he took a photo before helping the crash survivors. “But we were pulling up to the plane and had no way of helping until we were next to the wing,” he told me.

Krums took just that one picture because “the rest of the time [I] was helping with the rescue and had given my phone to one of the survivors.”

It sounds to me like Krums was inadvertently acting like a photojournalist. He couldn't help survivors from where he was, so he did the only thing he could: grab a photo and deliver the message to the world.

He wasn't following any rules — simply doing what came natural to him.

Since that day in 2009, mobile phone and social media use has exploded. Wherever we are, whatever we see happening, we all arrive equipped: ready to capture the moment, document the action in photos, pictures and words; every element a button click away from being shared.

The question for us, as burgeoning citizen journalists, is what do we do? We walk the streets with our smartphones in our hands, which means we’re already halfway to capturing the news. In that moment, more and more of us will be asked to make the choice, do we capture or call, do we document or help?

The answers will not always be easy. Sometimes it will come automatically, other times, we may be as tortured as the world’s professional photojournalists likely are. We are not all heroes and no one expects us to dive into dangerous situations with our smartphone at the ready. On the other hand, we may not always comprehend the import of what we see. Perhaps we started to grab the photo because the scene playing out looks interesting. If it turns dire, do we put down the phone?

I’d like to imagine that if it were me in the subway and I had my iPhone with me, I would have run to Han to try and pull him to safety first. Perhaps I would have enlisted others. I’m sure everyone has had that thought. Only Abbasi knows the reality of the situation. I do wonder, though, if there are smartphone photos of the incident that others thought better of sharing.

I’m sure some people might tweet a photo of the incident. I do not begrudge them that act, as long as the next impulse is to help where possible.