BBC & the Quake - citizens shaken into record participating

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I am in an openDemocracy, Polis, MacArthur seminar on credibility and the news. It's terrifically interesting with a great mix of people from the US and Russia especially and we are just listening to Flemming Rose of Jyllands-Posten who published the famous cartoons of Mohammad in Denmark. Earlier we heard Steve Herrmann of the BBC. He told me over coffee that over 27,000 people emailed the BBC about the earthquake and how it was for them. It seems to me that the Corporation has covered how the press responded to the quake much better than it has reported on how its own citizen correspondents did. The first reports of the event were emailed into the BBC news room, the BBC has relatively strong local coverage. What happened? Does the fact that it moderates all its mail and publishes only a little mean that we don't realise how many turn to the BBC to tell it what is happening on their street?