A grainy cell phone video taken by a survivor gave viewers worldwide their first look at the London Underground bombing -- and shined a spotlight on a small but growing part of electronic newsgathering.

That haunting image of people escaping through the smoke-filled, claustrophobic gloom was taken with a mobile phone camera by Adam Stacey and was used by many news media, often without giving him credit, who found it online at moblog.co.uk.

Much as the blog phenomenon has given citizens power over the news, cell phone videos have allowed people in the right place at the right time the ability to capture crucial events when there's no TV cameras in sight. These videos have shown up in network news coverage of the second Bush inauguration, Pope John Paul II's funeral and coverage of damage from the recent tropical storms. ABC and NBC have both given space to cell phone videos, well before Thursday morning.

"It's transforming technology," said Mark Lukasiewicz, executive producer of NBC News specials and special projects.

For the millions worldwide equipped with an appropriate phone there's the opportunity to shoot amateur video of up to about a minute, store it in memory and then send it via e-mail anywhere in the world. That's just what happened Thursday, when this new type of amateur video made its way to Sky, APTN and beyond.

Tom Cibrowski, senior broadcast producer of "Good Morning America," said running the video -- the network started airing it around 7:30 a.m. EDT -- gave a look at a place where journalists' cameras weren't able to go. While he said the video quality wasn't the best, it was still valuable.

"(Cell phone video) is a tremendous asset to us," Cibrowski said.

Jon Klein, president of CNN, agrees. "It's a good thing as long as we verify the footage and authenticate it," Klein said. This video cleared the authentication process at all the networks.

NBC News has taken a strong interest in the delivery of news via cell phone in a form called NBC Mobile. Lukasiewicz said the network believes in it so much that they've begun equipping reporters and other staff members with video-enabled cell phones.

"It allows our reporting staff to record images in a situation where there's nothing else available," he said. "As today demonstrates, you never know where or when news is going to happen."

As with most cultural phenomena, photoblogging bubbled up from the grass roots. Online community photo albums, which have been proliferating quietly for the past few years, abruptly came into their own as countless users felt compelled to share their first-hand experience of the London disaster with each other.

Caterina Fake, who co-founded the popular online photo community Flickr, was not surprised to see her site's traffic more than double within hours of the news breaking.

"We've seen an amazing eruption of citizen journalism stories since we launched Flickr," she said. "It's a confluence of trends: The distribution of camera phones to regular people and the means to immediately e-mail their photos from their phones is a big development. Also, many people are on broadband so they're able to experience the news more fluidly than ever before."

Fake said the Flickr office had its own moment of convergence in the early hours. Staff members were upgrading their storage capabilities when two people simultaneously were made aware of the London explosions -- one saw a professional news agency's online report, while the other saw photos being posted by a Flickr user.

"It's all about experiencing things live online, as they're happening, along with the people who are there," Fake said. "The immediacy of the experience is part of the magic."

Fake noted how many newspapers and television stations have added blogs of their own. "We have changed the way news is done," she said. "What we're seeing is that instant publishing has seeped into traditional journalistic practice."

Paul Gough reported from New York; Chris Marlowe reported from Los Angeles.