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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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.

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[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!

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[The following manifesto is reprinted from Small World News]

Award Winning Web Video from Small World News

I’d like to imagine a world where an alternative global video news and documentary network has been established. A network that enables those in the areas most at-risk from human-trafficking, destruction of the environment, availability of deadly weapons worldwide, and internal disputes due to ethnic rivalries, competition for resources, and others. Such a network might have enabled Iraqis to learn from Rwandans and others about the dangers of ethnic conflict, and alternate realities behind its origins. It could enable those at risk from genocide or ethnic cleansing to speak directly to the international community rather than, as in Darfur, forcing refugees to depend on NGOs and States with their own agendas at work.

But the best thing about such a network is that its possible now. The only thing that limits our capability to build such a network is a moderate amount of funding and a vision. With the affordability of DV equipment, and more and more, HD and mpeg4 equipment, a broadcast quality mobile production studio, with archiving capabilities, can be outfitted for well under $10,000.00.

I believe within a few years time we can create an international network, with community video units, aka “bureaus” operating in five regions or more, producing and distributing content for their local community. However, what gets me really excited, is knowing that utilizing the internet we can now broaden the reach of those teams to one that is truly global. We can create a new “60 Minutes” style program, where the stories are defined by those most affected, where using twitter and blog commenting and other outlets the viewers and community members alike can drive the discussion and offer questions and feedback.

But we can also broaden our reach beyond video, utilizing tools such as Utterli to enable members of the community to make radio reports on an individual basis(see our work on Alive in Gaza), or partner with Ushahidi to assist mobile phone users to contribute from areas where a video unit has worked recently or is preparing to travel.

We can utilize video to build a focus, a groundswell of attention, and then broaden to other social media tools that in some communities will be better suited for long-term and regular usage.

Alive in Baghdad, as one of the most award-winning, though arguably one of the least-funded, web video projects, has shown the viability, the strength of this medium. We can distribute the stories of individuals and communities in crisis across not only their community, country, or continent, but the globe. In so doing, we may be able to curb many of the great intractable issues of our day.

All we need to accomplish this is possess the will to do it and, as always, a little funding.

We need your support to make this happen. If you’re a grant writer, or you know grant writers, please write.

If you have suggestions about funding sources, or locations you’d like to see us put this model into action, please write.

If you have resources, whether funds, equipment, skills or otherwise that you’d like to contribute, please write.

Comment below or email us at smallworldnews at Gmail dot com, and let us know how you can help or give us your own testaments about our work.

Together we can imagine a world of many voices, a big world made small. Together we can build Small World News.

On behalf of my colleagues worldwide, from Kenya to Iraq, Mexico to Afghanistan, I look forward to working with you in the future,

Brian Conley

Director, Small World News

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