Citizen Journals Takes Flight?

Here's another airplane in distress story from yesterday that you might have heard about: An Alaskan Airlines jet flying out of Seattle lost cabin pressure, did the whole oxygen-masks-dropping-from-ceiling thing (that I'm sure made people wish they had actually listened to the pre-flight safety briefing) and then returned to the airport safely.

There's a citizen journalism aspect to this, too: Jeremy Hermanns, a blogger and private pilot himself, blogged his account of the incident, complete with camera phone photos from his Treo 650. His pics were featured prominently in the regular media's coverage, as well.

Fellow passenger Damon Zwicker had his video camera rolling, too -- you can see excerpts of the video [QuickTime movie] he shot.

The video quality is pretty good, so I'm guessing it was probably from a full-fledged video camera of some sort, not a camera phone. Traditional media still has a challenge trying to figure out how to make amateur video (which I guess is the less-sexy predecessor of "citizen journalist") look presentable on TV -- what works in a Web-browser window may not necessarily look good on a TV screen.

If you watched any of Bravo's Viral Videos TV show, you'll know what I mean.

Thanks -- Joe