Posts tagged citizen journalism
Relying on freelance journalism in Afghanistan’s “Land of Secrets”
Tired of seeing interest and quality reporting leave Afghanistan with the war, a new outlet called razistan.org has set out to help freelance photo/videographers in Kabul cover the country’s less documented people and events.
via its Tumblr:
Razistan.org aims to help give Afghanistan the attention it demands. Our core project is a website of unique photo essays and short video documentaries that bring into vivid relief not only the war and its participants but also the country and its people. Contributors include both award-winning Kabul-based photojournalists from around the world and local Afghan photographers and videographers. There is much more to the war than the mainstream media has shown. The purpose of Razistan — or “land of secrets” — is to reveal these untold stories.
See their Kickstarter, as well as this post from yesterday, which laments what mainstream war reporting has become.
Photo: Lorenzo Tugnoli.
The easy lesson might be that journalism is not a game of bean bag, and it would be best left to professionals. But we are in a pro-am informational world where news comes from all directions. Traditional media still originate big stories, but many others come from all corners — books, cellphone videos, blogs and, yes, radio shows built on storytelling.
Theater, Disguised Up as Real Journalism – New York Times media pundit David Carr, characteristically keen as ever, cuts to the heart of the Mike Daisey / Apple / This American Life affair. (via explore-blog)
FJP: And, perhaps, an example of why James H. Smith is so angry.
The Man Who Stayed Behind
(via The New York Times)
The Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof talks with Ryan Boyette, a Florida man who braves bombs to document atrocities in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains.
Boyette:
There is no way we could have left and said we hope that you make it out on the other end of this okay. So we decided to stay and we decided to form a team and report what was happening.
Kristof:
To its credit, the Obama administration is working hard to end the food blockade in Nuba. But Boyette is skeptical, as am I, that the measures under consideration will be enough to avert starvation. If Boyette has anything to do with it, images of Nuba—courage, resilience, and suffering—will make it into American living rooms and build the political will for Washington and the world to take firm action.
5 minute video. Powerful work.
Basil Al-Sayed, Who Chronicled The Syrian Uprising, Is Dead.
From NPR:
This was the last thing Basil al-Sayed, a citizen journalist in Syria, filmed before he was shot in the head by security forces:
According to activist Rami Jarrah, yesterday, al-Sayed succumbed to his injuries at a hospital in the restive city of Homs. He was 24.
“We have thousands of citizen journalists,” Jarrah told NPR’s Deb Amos. “But Basil was one of those who stood out.”
Jarrah said al-Sayed filmed security forces opening fire directly at protesters, and that put him at serious risk.
“He was documenting stuff that no one could actually get hold of,” Jarrah said. “I don’t want to say this was expected, but he was always in those situations where you could expect something would happen to him.”….
Foreign journalists have been mostly banned from entering Syria since a popular uprising against the rule of President Bashar Assad began in the country 10 months ago. In many cases, the videos uploaded to YouTube by citizen journalists have been the only way for the outside world to see the clashes that have cost more than 5,000 people their lives in Syria.
Who’s Watching Who, Aerial Drone Edition
Via Wired:
In the video above, protesters in Warsaw got a drone’s eye view of a phalanx of police in riot gear during a heated Saturday demonstration. The drone — spotted by Wired editor-in-chief and drone-builder Chris Anderson — was a tiny Polish RoboKopter equipped with a videocamera.
As Chris observes, no more do citizens need to wait for news choppers to get aerial footage of a major event. With drones, they can shoot their own overhead video. But the implications run deeper than that.
The Occupy events around the country gained initial notoriety by filming and uploading incidents of apparent police brutality. Anyone with a cellphone camera and a YouTube account could become a videographer, focusing attention on behavior that cops or banks might not want broadcasted or that the media might not transmit. When the New York Police Department cleared out Zuccotti Park on Tuesday, out came the cellphones to document it.
Getting an aerial view is the next step in compelling DIY citizen video.
Oakland police take out videographer with a rubber bullet.
Via Photo District News.
[C]hanges in technology and society have made the lines between private citizen and journalist exceedingly difficult to draw. The proliferation of electronic devices with video-recording capability means that many of our images of current events come from bystanders [and] news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper. Such developments make clear why the news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.
Judge Kermit Lipez, US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in a ruling in favor of Simon Glik, a Massachusetts man arrested for videotaping police officers with his cell phone as they detained another man. Glik was accused of illegal wiretapping, aiding the escape of a prisoner and disturbing the peace.
Matthew Ingram, GigaOm, Freedom of the press applies to everyone — yes, even bloggers.
Brutally beaten down, desperate, without any chance of recourse to any countries’ law, by holding up a cell phone and filming the death of a small child they are screaming at a world they think isn’t listening.
Luke Allnutt, Radio Free Europe, The Death Of Oula Jablawi And The Democratization Of Bearing Witness.
Oula Jablawi was a two-year-old girl shot dead by Syrian forces, video of which was posted to YouTube and spread across social networks.
Allnutt writes that in the past, traditional media acted as gatekeepers of images such as this and often chose not to publish explicit and graphic material that might upset its audience.
That hierarchical model no longer holds as ordinary citizens with ordinary technology commit acts of journalism and documentation to share with one another and the world.
Really good data journalism will help us untangle the truth from… prejudiced assumptions.
But this is data journalism that needs to stay the course, and seems like an ideal opportunity to do “long-form data journalism”. How long will these looters serve? What is the ethnic make-up and age range of those convicted? How many other criminals will get an early release because our jails are newly full of looters? How many people convicted this week will go on to re-offend?
Martin Belam, Currybet.net, “Riots are an opportunity for long-form data journalism”
Belam writes that England’s riots are an important opportunity for data journalism to prove its worth over the long term.
That said, he cautions that data gathered from and during the riots will skew overall numbers because of the spasm of activity which, in turn, could lead to more problems:
There can be genuine social consequences to the misinterpretation of data. If the postcodes in Enfield become marked as a place where crime is now more likely as a result of one night of violence, then house prices could be depressed and insurance costs will rise, meaning the effects of the riots will still be felt long after broken windows are replaced.
We witnessed both the Mumbai attacks through Twitpics. The London Riots are now seen through Instagram. We embrace the app for artistic and social snaps – are these shots too stylish for the gritty truth? And what is happening to our perception of events if they instantly turn into poprocketed-lomo-earlybird-filtered icons?
Survey respondents, when asked about the actual incidence of problems related to online activity, reported a remarkably high level of incidents and attacks stemming from their online activities. One third of respondents reported personal threats. One fifth reported that one or more of their online accounts had been hacked. One in seven unwillingly had their online identify exposed. Nine percent of respondents had been arrested or detained.
In a survey of 98 bloggers from the Middle East and North Africa, researchers from Harvard’s Berkman Center explore issues of online security and perceptions of risk as the bloggers write about social and political issues in their respective countries.
The bloggers chosen for the survey were those that had been cited by Global Voices Online, an international news and citizen media aggregator. The survey was conducted in May 2011.
The report’s authors note a caveat in their findings:
The unusual sample populated by reform-minded bloggers and the timing of the survey — following a period of intense online activism and government attempts to quell this activity—contribute to these high figures. This makes it impossible to extrapolate to other populations and regions. Nevertheless, these reported figures are astounding from our perspective and highlight the vital importance of security concerns for online activists. As we anticipated, the respondents report a mix of cyber attacks and offline responses to their online activities.
It is more than a little ironic that small-town papers have been thriving by practicing what the mainstream media are now preaching… Hyper-localism,’ ‘Citizen Journalism,’ ‘Advocacy Journalism’ — these are some of the latest buzzwords of the profession. But the concepts, without the fancy names, have been around for ages in small-town newspapers.
Today, in Citizen Journalism
The Tiziano Project provides people in conflict and post-conflict zones “the equipment, training, and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives.”
Recent projects have included multimedia documentary reporting from Kurdistan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Rwanda
The organization just received a $200 thousand grant from the Knight Foundation to continue pursuing their work.
Via Global Voices:
This first part of a documentary on the Egyptian Revolution tells it from the perspective of blogger and viral video producer Aalam Wassef, focusing on how online video and other media accompanied a process of civilian unrest…
…The video is described as a manual on how a civil resistance was built to win, and follows the history of unrest in Egypt going back several years. Aalam Wassef tells his story of how he started posting videos under a pseudonym back in 2007 criticizing the government, and how they became viral.
But it wasn’t just luck: Wassef, blogging under different assumed names, would also publish blog posts, get advertising spaces on Google’s search engine and in short, ensure that whomever could get his message, would. And then, to go onto the “real” world, press.
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