At 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 30, the world as he knew it turned upside down.Nice job capturing and reporting on that moment.
Steve Garfield captured the momentous occasion with his iPhone, reporting in real time from the scene of the tumult: aisle 7 of the Roche Bros. supermarket in West Roxbury, where Garfield found himself in utter confusion while trying to make a routine shopping run.
As Garfield, an ace citizen journalist, spread his firsthand findings from the store to shoppers everywhere, he wondered: What in the name of Orville Redenbacher was the popcorn doing next to the pet food?
"Everything's changed!" he audiostreamed on one of his websites, www.offonatangent.com. "They moved the chips! They moved the juice! Everything's crazy! . . . I know the economy's bad. You've got a lot of issues that are bigger than figuring out where this stuff is in the supermarket. But why, when we're all concerned about if our banks are failing, do we have to go and relearn the whole format of the supermarket?"
As a citizen journalist I like to experiment with lots of different technologies for reporting news. I also teach these new media tools at Boston University.
You can learn more at SteveGarfield.com
The technology behind recording and reporting with a cell phone is Utterli. It allows you to call into a phone number, record your message, and have that message posted both to Utterli and to your blog if you have one. If you email a photo in to Utterli, that photo gets associated with your audio post.
Here's the audio report Ric Kahn wrote about in the Globe article:
Here's another audio post about the nice looking fruit at Roche Bros.
Finally here's one more report from Roche Bros about the Olive Bar: