Citizen Journalism by Josh Mull

[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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Hey everybody. Since I’ll be taking on a lot of new projects soon, it’s best that I give up the foolishness or trying to maintain eleventy billion sites and just consolidate everything at this one site. Don’t worry, it’ll still be the same Read or Alive as before, and I’ll still be the same Ultimate Josh I’ve always been, but now it’s in one nice little package for you! See, this won’t be so bad.

And since it’s me, you know there’s gonna be lots of sharing and yakking and sundry new media nefariousness. Let’s start with sharing, since it’s my favorite.

You can find my Google Reader Shared feed here. I use it share stuff like funny things I find on Digg, the Onion, useful apps from Lifehacker, and just generally interesting bits I come across on the web. I update it quite frequently, most of the time daily. If you’re my friend on Gmail or Google Talk, you’ll see this stuff automatically in your Google Reader under Friends. If you’re not using Google Reader, why not? It’s so easy. Jump into RSS here.

My Google Reader Starred feed is also public here. I separate the stories in this feed from my Shared Feed because this feed is for hard news only. It’s all stiff-lipped foreign policy stuff. It’s good stuff if you’re interested in foreign affairs and what’s going on in your world, but hey, it’s 2008. I know you’re busy.

I’m also a big fan of seeing what other people share, so if you use Google Reader, drop me a line!

As for the caustic and obnoxious histrionics you enjoy so much, I always have my micro-blog at Twitter. I can’t get enough of Twitter and its beautiful 140 characters. I follow just about everyone that friends me, so follow away!

So, what social sites do you use? Drop me a comment and let me know.

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