Under gisselkrisen blomstret live feeds som aldri før. Men for at den tråd skal leve må den ha råmateriale. I Algeries tilfelle var de offisielle kildene sparsomme og upålitelige.

Det ble nye kilder, som nyhetsbyrået ANI i Mauretania som steppet inn.

Utenriksminister Espen Barth Eide brukte tid på å advare mot å tro på «rykter», men det var disse «ryktene» som ga et mer sannferdig bilde av hva som skjedde.

Etter den første reaksjonen på at algirske sikkerhetsstyrker åpnet ild, snudde man og tonen er nå positiv til myndighetenes håndtering.

Det er for unyansert. Ikke bare utkjempet Algerie en blodig borgerkrig, myndighetene har selv mye blod på hendene. Hæren og sikkerhetsstyrkene lar ingen kikke dem i kortene.

Det var derfor tvitring som «åpnet» opp nyhetsstrømmen  og ga vestlige journalister en vurdering av de ulike versjonene: uten en slik vurdering fra en lokal kilde blir opplysningene umulig å forholde seg til. En slik kilde var Baki Mansour, som via twitterkontoen @7our holdt verdenspressen oppdatert.

Robert Spencer i telegraph, forteller om hans rolle:

I read all this with interest because it struck me at the time that the crisis was going to be a great case study for modern instant reportage, and in particular the use of new media. This was a country virtually uncovered by English-language international media, with few if any good contacts, with a repressive government that doesn’t hand out either information or visas easily (I’m still waiting for mine). There was never going to be any access anywhere near the site, even if reporters were there – it was surrounded by the army. And even well-connected journalists specialising in Islamic terror movements might have been stretched to get their own sources in the splittist, obscure world of Saharan jihad. How on earth were we supposed to get information?

@7our was one of the answers. He was invaluable, as we followed his leads to agencies we had never noticed before – a new independent rival to the Algerian Press Service, TSA, blogs, newspapers like Al-Akhbar, (the Algerian one, not the Lebanese one), ANI itself. But few of us could tell how reliable their reporting was – my only experiences of Al-Akhbar previously were not, shall we say, encouraging. That was one reason that, when feeding our own live blog on the crisis, I was sceptical about initial reports of Algerian helicopters bombing hostages – I first read it there. I was wrong, and they were right, as it soon emerged.

That’s the trouble though. There is no doubt that with the instant nature of modern news gathering, it is hard to apply perspective to our sources, in particular as news seems more truly global than ever, or at least than in the days of my youth when Washington, Paris, Moscow, Jerusalem and Johannesburg just about covered it. This week Algeria, next week it’ll be some blogger in Tajikistan we’re all relying on. On the other hand, I’m always a glass-half-full guy: at the end of the day, even with a silent Algerian government trying to block news getting out, we ended up telling a shocking story the broad outlines of which proved correct – more correct than I feared when we were doing it. I think 20 years ago we’d have got nowhere near it.

 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/richardspencer/100199794/algeria-secretive-and-bloody-has-been-a-test-of-the-new-instant-form-of-reporting-one-it-has-partially-passed/