Citizen Journalism by Josh Mull

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.

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[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!

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So here it is Monday morning, I leave saturday to head to Denver, and I still don’t have a very clear idea as to what I’m bringing with me. Well I have the hardware figured out, but I’m still not totally settled on the software side of things.

Maybe you can help me figure out what to use on this wacky adventure of mine. So let’s break this down by hardware shall we?

First up I’ll be bringing the iPhone. Incidentally I’m typing this post on my phone, so by the end of it we can safely say that I’ve tested wordpress’s mobile capability. For communication, I’ve got palringo so I can connect to all my IM services like aim and google talk and such. I’ve got twinkle for updating my Twitter although I’ve noticed a lot of people prefer twitterific. Am I making the right choice on that? For photos i’m using standard email to post to Flickr. Pretty sure this doesn’t geotag or mark them by location though which is something I’d like to be able to do. Is there a better app to post to Flickr from the iPhone than just standard email?

On the laptop, I’m of course already settled with my communication apps like digsby and twhirl. What I’m really concerned with is video. Since my video camera only records to tape (ugh I know) any video I shoot on it won’t be available until I get back from BOTH conventions. I’ll be relying on the built in webcam on my vaio as well as a logitech USB webcam which I’m still not sure I’m bringing. My question to you is what video streaming software should I use? I already have a blogtv account and one with operator11. Not sure I like either of them though. I like what I’ve seen so far from oovoo, is it worth checking out? I don’t have a Qik account but I sure wouldn’t turn down an invite ;)

So what do you think? What should I use to geotag my Flickr photos from the iPhone? What software should I use to stream live video? Drop me a line and let me know.

UPDATE: Wordpress on the iphone worked great, although I did have to log in from the dashboard to add in the special tags for the front page icons. Oh well, small price to pay for blogging on the go, I guess!

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