Coverage of Alive in Afghanistan

The latest project from Small World News, Alive in Afghanistan, is receiving a lot of attention in the media and around the blogosphere. Here’s a selection of the coverage we’ve found.

The LA Times has this:

Alive in Afghanistan is a multimedia reporting project that solicits reports by way of SMS, e-mail and Twitter from ordinary Afghanis and posts them alongside reports by professional journalists from the Pajhwok Afghan News agency.

Verified reports were then posted on an interactive map, allowing users to access the latest reports of polling center closings, explosions, rocket attacks and intimidation.

Although, as the founders of the site readily admit, only a minority of Afghanis know how to use the site and have access to it, it’s still a great resource for real-time election news from Afghanistan.

From the BBC

Citizens can report disturbances, defamation and vote tampering, or incidents where everything “went well”.

Their reports feature alongside those of full-time Afghan journalists to ensure the election and reporting of it is as “free and fair” as possible.

“We hope to enable people to report on what is going on in the country,” explained Brian Conley, who helped set up the project.

“In the rural areas there are not going to be monitors, and it is questionable how much international media coverage there will be in these areas.”

Additional text and video reports will be added by a network of 80 reporters from the Afghan Pajhwok news agency, he said.

And the infamous server-choking segment from Rachel Maddow, from which we thankfully recovered.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: Afghanistan, brian conley, citizen journalism, mobile, OSINT, video

I’m Afraid of Americans: Understanding the New Threat of Domestic Terrorism

[Note: the following is an excerpt of an essay written for Enduring America.]

America’s National Security Strategy is changing.

Last week the New York Times published an article detailing the Pentagon’s plan to shift focus away from international terrorism, known under the previous administration as the Global War on Terror, towards larger strategic threats to the United States such as destabilized governments and mass refugee crises provoked by climate change. Most in the defense establishment welcome this shift in strategy, but the threat from terrorism still remains.

This time, however, there is a difference. The terror threat comes largely not from foreign nationals but from Americans.

In 2009 almost 70 Americans, including police officers and medical personnel, have been killed by domestic terror attacks. This is a breathtakingly sharp rise from 2008, when only two people lost their lives, both of whom died at the hands of anti-Liberal terrorist Jim D. Adkisson in Tennessee. The first attack in 2009 was in Samson, Alabama, when Michael McLendon went on a cross-county shooting rampage that killed 11 people including himself. The most recent was on June 10, when James von Brunn opened fire inside the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, killing one guard and wounding several others.

While each of these attacks is unique, they can be roughly broken down into a handful of categories. In this piece, we will explore these terrorist archetypes, the ecosystem that produced them, as well as common tactics, both harmful and helpful, used to counter them. The intention is to provide students, analysts and researchers, with a sound and coherent image of the domestic terror threat facing the United States.

Read the Full Article

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: liberals, long war, obama, Politics, surveillance, terrorism

Somalia: A New Look At Piracy

[Cross posted from Small World News]

The television media was covering the abduction of one Captain Richard Phillips almost non-stop over the week leading up to Easter. When it was announced that 3 of the 4 pirates holding the captain were killed and he was rescued, the commentators on all the major networks exploded in an orgy of nationalist hoo-rah fervor. They succeeded in showing they could Faux News with the best of them.

They did not succeed, however, in helping us better understand the Somali piracy issue. What might a news agency need to provide insight into the causes of Somali pirac? First of all, they need you the viewer/reader/listener/audience to take a vested interest in learning more about Somalia’s pirates, or pirates in general.

Somalia is a great example of a situation where pirates have a very clear cause and a very clear, though incredibly difficult, solution.

But as I was saying, let’s imagine we have a news agency funded initially through small investment or foundation money. If we establish a bureau in Nairobi, we can cover many subjects in sub-Saharan east Africa. One of the easiest ses of tools available to mobile journalists was presented in the form of the Reuters Mobile Toolkit. Unfortunately, in the last 18 months since it was made public, we’ve seen little in the way of new and innovative journalism being done with these basic tools.

So this is where I suggest a new way to create media, community funded and supported, i.e. community invested news. This has been discussed before, here for example. I’m just going to take the idea, and suggest how we can apply it, in this case to learning more about Somali pirates.

Let’s assume we’ve funded the equipment for a team based in Nairobi-more about how to fund that in a later post, but my previous model for Afghanistan looks a bit similar to what I’ll be proposing.

So, imagine if you could tweet your own questions for Somali pirates and have them answered via audio or perhaps even video within a few days? We can do that right now, utilizing skype, mobile phone networks, and even Utterli or drop.io. When news came that the pirates were killed and Captain Phillips freed, our correspondent in Harardhere could have provided immediate access to the response of locals in the pirate village. Viewers at home could have asked their own questions of the locals supported by Somalia’s pirate economy.

In the days after Captain Phillips was freed, rather than speculation about the potential for Somalia’s pirates to band to join forces with Islamist militias, rather than interviewed so-called “experts” about what might or might not happen, our community-funded team could be asking local residents.

The most affordable form they could be producing content in would be text blogging. With the support of the audience, our local producer will be able to produce audio, video, photo, or perhaps more interactive reports. The quality, and quantity of coverage depends on the audience’ level of interest and willingness to support.

Wouldn’t you like to know that you could influence Anderson Cooper, Brian Williams, or Keith Olbermann’s coverage? With Small World News, of course you have a say in the coverage, because you’ll help write our paychecks.

As always, please email us or leave a comment below, especially if you have assistance or advice to offer!

Popularity: 11% [?]

Tags: brian conley, citizen journalism, CNN, globalization, human rights, indymedia, intelligence, Kenya, mobile, OSINT, Piracy, Somalia, Strategic Forecasting, Sudan, surveillance, terrorism, twitter

Don’t Blink: Obama Administration Funds the Civil War in Palestine

[The following post was published on Enduring America]

On April 9, President Obama sent his 2009 supplemental budget request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Congress. Predictably, most of the media coverage was simply carried over and adapted from the previous battle over funding for the military.

For example, some attention has centered upon the stiff opposition to Secretary of Defense Gates’ decision not to order additional F-22 fighters. While this discussion is important, particularly on the usefulness of F-22 fighter planes in Iraq, there was something else in this supplemental budget that seems to have escaped notice.

We find this on page 6:

$0.8 billion to support the Palestinian people, strengthen the Palestinian Authority, and provide humanitarian assistance for the crisis in Gaza.

Read the Whole Article

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tags: Afghanistan, Al-Aqsa Martyrs, Barack Obama, F-22, Fatah, FY2009 Supplemental Budget, Gaza Strip, Hamas, iraq, Islamic Jihad, Israel, Israel Gaza border, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Qassam rockets, Robert Gates, terrorism, West Bank

What would Alive in Kabul look like?

It’s rare to hear about Afghanistan these days, despite the so-called re-deployment of forces and a new direction for the “war on terror” under a new president. But when we do hear about Afghanistan it often looks something like this:

KABUL (AP) — The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan says its troops have killed four suspected militants and detained two others during a raid in the country’s south.

A coalition statement says the raid targeted a Taliban bomb-making cell in Maywand district of the southern Kandahar province Monday.

Southern Afghanistan is a center of the Taliban-led insurgency, where thousands of new U.S. troops have been ordered to join the fight by President Barack Obama to try to reverse militant gains of the last three years.

I’ve re-posted that in full, because it’s the ENTIRE ARTICLE. That is what often passes as an article fro Afghanistan these days. Where are the photos? What did the “militants” look like? Who did they work for? Where is the evidence of the “bomb-making cell?”

Re-read the article. Its quite clearly a republishing of a Coalition press release. Now let’s imagine this story in another way. You visit a news website and see the headline “4 insurgents killed in southern Afghanistan.” On the site in front of you, you see a series of photos, in this case, the house that was raided. Next you notice there is an icon with a ubiquitous “play” triangle, you click it and are brought immediately to the scene in Afghanistan, you can hear the ambient noise and a voice in English, perhaps stilted, or a local language, voiced-over in English, describes the scene and proceeds to interview a number of neighbors, “what did you know about this house? Did you see what happened? What do you think about the coalition forces?”

And below this, a brief update written in text, contextualized with an idea of what the government/security situation is like in this area, speculation as to who these “militants” might be, something about the number of incidents in the region lately.

Or better yet, perhaps you came to read an article titled something like “Life in Khost, a day on the border with Pakistan.” You’ve come to read this article because via Twitter you posed the question “what do locals think about the increase in US troops in the border region of Afghanistan?”

You find a detailed piece describing life and the livelihoods of several Afghani residents, including photos, and, again, an audio clip that can be played immediately from your browser with a series of Afghanis relating their opinions about the presence of US troops and a short description of their daily life. In this case there is also a series of short video clips you can play back, for once you’ve really gotten a feel for what life might be like in Afghanistan, and from the Afghani perspective.

This isn’t a bizarre “Reality television” pitch, but a real possibility, right now, that could be implemented within a few months, possibly even weeks. What it lacks is funding and the clear presence of an interested and supportive community.

An internet connection in Kandahar will run $300/month for enough bandwidth to post stories, photos, and perhaps highly compressed video. A decent salary for an Afghani would be 300/month. So for $1800/month 5 producers with a decent internet connection could begin producing media in Afghanistan.

The other start-up costs depend on the quality and type of the media desired. Using Utterli its possible to record and post audio dispatches via mobile phone directly to the web, in this case the added cost to cover would be the phone credit and travel.

For $1500 we could purchase 10 Flip Video cameras which would be enough to produce basic quality video as a start, with the added advantage of extra cameras for loaners and backups in the predictable case of broken or stolen equipment.

Of course this can’t be done without sending someone to Afghanistan to courier equipment and training for the local producers, setting an initial cost, besides equipment, at perhaps 15k for airfare, a stipend, and basic expenses.

If we can raise 25k we can start a journalism project in southern Afghanistan, where there are no longer ANY journalists based full-time. Proving the model in southern Afghanistan is a big step towards building a nation-wide news organization, as well as beginning a project on the other side of the border, inside Pakistan.

I’m certain 25 thousand dollars sounds like a lot, given the state of the world economy. However, given President Obama’s policies of escalation in Afghanistan, and our utter lack of knowledge about the situation on the ground, can we afford *not* to be getting quality on-the-ground news from southern Afghanistan?

I look forward to working with each and every one of you to build a crowd-funded news organization to provide the information we truly want to be reading/watching/hearing.

More models to come.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tags: Add new tag, Afghanistan, Blog, brian conley, citizen journalism, globalization, OSINT, share, video

Small World News: A New Era of Entrepreneurship

[The following is cross-posted from Small World News]

Brian Conley on RocketBoom

John Yemma writes about the speech given last Thursday by Marty Baron, Boston Globe editor, in the CS Monitor “Editor’s blog” Connecting the Dots.

Mr. Baron raised the hopeful image of a “new era of entrepreneurship.” This very image has been raised before many times. The question we should concern ourselves with is of course, where will it lead?

The New York Times purchased the Boston Globe in 1993, at the time one of its top regional competitors, and one of the nation’s most acclaimed and profitable newspapers. Although analysts say its been losing money since then, and the Globe had a 10% circulation drop in a six month period in 2008, the question has to be asked yet again why this occurred?

I remember the Boston Globe being the only paper covering the 2000 Presidential Debates with the courage to clarify the fact that police officers were the first to use violence against demonstrators, which later escalated into something resembling a full-scale riot by the end of the evening. However, I can’t help feeling that the quality of the Globe’s coverage decreased dramatically from this highlight in 2000 until the present-day.

I also can’t help feeling that the cause of such a decrease is directly tied to the profit motive. There was a previous era of entrepreneurship, just after World War I, when journalism truly began to flourish. Unfortunately individuals such as William Hearst and others, the first media moguls, were the ones whose motives for an earlier version of “a million page views” led to the eventual situation we find ourselves in today.

But it wasn’t their profit motive alone, it was also our failure to recognize that although freedom of speech must be a vehemently defended right, where there is a tendency toward profit and a bottom-line motive, regulation is a necessity.

Had the New York Times been prevented from purchasing its rival the Boston Globe in 1993, and other similarly monopolistic moves throughout the US media industry, perhaps a new era of entrepreneurship might have flourished sooner, one that recognized if we wish to have honest, forthright, quality journalism, we need to protect, cultivate, and value journalism as something which should never have a primary directive of selling soap. Either we are in the pursuit of honest, informed journalism, or we are in the business of selling soap. I don’t believe it can be both.

Last week I started to imagine for you a new world of journalism. I’d like to continue that with a few questions,

What do you want to see from journalists and newsmakers in the future?

What do you desire most that’s not available in your news currently?

Would you pay a subscription fee to support journalism that mattered to you?

What if it provided you the ability to ask questions of those interviewed?

What if it enabled you to interact with the producers and subjects of content?

What else might convince you to pay to support journalism that matters to you?

______

Please comment below and reblog!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tags: brian conley, citizen journalism, globalization, OSINT, share, video, war