There was an audible gasp from the auditorium when Paul Cutler mentioned the Holocaust on stage at Media140 in Sydney. Here, indefatigable guest blogger, Paul Farrell re-examines the question and gives his own thought-provoking analysis of this controversial “What if?”

“How would history have recorded the holocaust if there had been I-phones in the concentration camps?”

This was the unusual question that Paul Cutler, SBS director of news and current affairs, posed in his on stage tweet during the panel discussion about the use of new technology in getting coverage of events. While the answer seems quite simple to start with, the presence of new media in a conflict zone doesn’t always guarantee widespread coverage.

The recent war in Sri Lanka demonstrated that a crisis of horrific proportions, which many believe is tantamount to genocide, has not been given anywhere near the coverage it should warrant. There are also 300 000 Sri Lankan in internment camps, and yet this too has received a dismal amount of coverage.

Video footage from a mobile phone was recently placed online that claimed to show Sri Lankan military executing people in the war zone. Despite this, stories both in Australia and further abroad of the conflict are few and far between.

It’s very easy to praise the democratization of information, but without a combination of new and old media, the message will not get across. At the end of the day, a news editor still has to make a decision about whether to run a story or not, and the same rules can still apply. Stories about the situation in Sri Lanka have failed to generate much currency in media organisations around the world, presumably for this reason.

Tools like I-phones are great new journalistic adjuncts, but without platform and editorial support, they simply don’t equate to coverage. There are many more factors to enter into the equation, and this is one of the main points that came through from the speakers at both days of the conference.

Riyaad Minty, head of social media at Al Jazeera, spoke at length on this subject with regards to reporting in Gaza, and how social media tools can be used effectively in conjunction with broadcast journalism.

So would the Holocaust have been recorded differently if there had been I-phones inside the camps? Differently yes, but whether they would have driven the atrocities being committed into the headlines, sadly, may not have been the case, as the case of Sri Lanka shows.

New media tools do allow for direct access to information, but are still dependent on old media platforms for widespread distribution. Unfortunately, we can’t always rely on these platforms to provide coverage where it is due.