Television

Nothing changes but the pictures — and the messengers.

Eight years ago this week, noting that some students at Columbine had watched TV while trapped inside the Littleton, Colo., school and phoned local stations with on-the-scene reports, I wrote that “mass-murder scenes have gone high-tech.”

In the hours after the shootings, I’d interviewed a CNN executive who admitted he and others at the network had been struck by the prevalence of cell phones among the students and suggested cells might be where “beepers were 10 years ago.”

Since then, of course, cell phones have added bells and whistles, or at least increasingly annoying ringtones. Some allow us to watch TV, many more to make TV ourselves, thanks to cameras that shoot stills and video.

Horror has a new, shaky face, from the grainy clip of people evacuating a train after the July 7, 2005, bombing of London’s Underground, to Monday’s footage, repeated endlessly on CNN, of police outside Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall, a clip on which gunshots — 27, according to Wolf Blitzer — could be heard.

Although the sound was more arresting than the picture, what struck me about student Jamal Albarghouti’s cell-phone video was that he seems to have been moving toward the shooting when police stopped him.

With the exception of first responders, whose job is to rush toward trouble, that’s the kind of insanity that used to be the special province of newspeople.

Indeed, by midafternoon, CNN anchors were routinely referring to Albarghouti as “our I-reporter,” a designation a CNN spokeswoman later likened to “citizen journalism.” In other words, Albarghouti volunteered.

CNN.com has a place for this, labeled “I Report,” and those who submit photos, video and audio agree to grant the network and its affiliates “nonexclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to edit, telecast, rerun, reproduce, use, syndicate, license, print, sublicense, distribute and otherwise exhibit the materials you submit” — for free.

Albarghouti will, however, receive an undisclosed sum, CNN having decided to pay him after it first aired the footage, said the spokeswoman, who couldn’t say whether he’d been approached by other outlets.

Meanwhile, the video was racking up impressive stats, having been viewed more than 900,000 times on CNN.com by 3:14 p.m. — numbers that were updated by CNN anchors through the afternoon in a marriage of news and marketing.

In the course of the day, Albarghouti was interviewed by at least two CNNers, interviews that, without his video, wouldn’t have been very different from those CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC were conducting with other students.

Those students, though, were generally identified as “witnesses,” not reporters.

Most were at least as composed as Albarghouti. Some noted they’d failed to check their e-mail that morning and so missed the university’s first warning about the shooter.

There are limits to any technology, and when CNN’s Don Lemon was having trouble hearing the cell-phone videographer, the anchor had to ask Betty Nguyen, who was conducting the interview, to have Albarghouti move closer to a window.

“I don’t have a land line,” the student explained.