Blackberry Messenger, Google Maps, YouTube and other less conventional information hubs were put under scrutiny on the 21 January at the Frontline Club. Richard Pendry, a journalist and lecturer at the University of Kent, chaired the fully booked discussion titled: The Changing Face of News Gathering.
Well-versed in the art of unconventional news gathering and distribution, were a panel of speakers including; Eliot Higgins author of the Brown Moses Blog; Malachy Browne, news editor of Storyful; and Trushar Barot assistant editor at the social media and User Generated Content (UGT) at BBC News. The fourth panellist, whose true identity remained hidden, was the charity Videre’s head of operations who was referred to as Greg.
The categorisation of news gathering as traditional or non-traditional was flagged as problematic from the start. When asked if he considered himself a non-traditional reporter, Browne said:
“The source of information that we receive a few years ago would have been considered non-traditional, its primarily social media content that we work with… Its the application of traditional news values and journalism values to a new form of information.”
Browne continued,
“Storyful was founded on the idea that you can draw news from the noise… We filter the social web in a way so that we are able to monitor it very effectively.”
It was made clear that individuals are becoming citizen journalists by generating valuable content and presenting it to the public. Higgins is a good example of this, he became a well known journalist by gathering information on the weapons being used in Syria. Through online channels he effectively accessed and deciphered information which confirmed an arms smuggling route from Croatia through Jordan to the opposition fighters.
Barot gave us some perspective from within the BBC on the advancements of social media:
“Its changed a lot. Four years ago just finding a reporter who would take Twitter seriously as a journalistic tool was not easy… Now we have hundreds of reporters on Twitter.”
He went on to mark the 2011 UK riots as a point when Twitter really came into its own in conveying news as it happened. Barot said:
“As well as being a source of pictures, videos and eye-witness accounts we were feeding in real-time intelligence in terms of our news desks.”
Unlike some of the others’ approach, Greg’s organisation Videre, whose motto is “Seeing is Believing”, goes back to first-hand evidence collecting for various media and human rights organisations. Run like a secret intelligence core, Videre’s reporter’s identities’, as well as the information they collect, remain untraceable and their carefully gathered information is given away for free. Pendry outlined a potential concern:
“How does anyone know if any of this stuff is true? There is no transparency at all so it completely depends on everyone trusting you and the people that work with you.”
When asked why Videre does what it does, Greg answered simply, “To try to do good.”
It was made clear that the credibility of information and how to verify it is an issue which plagues new media sources. Higgins demonstrated how he pieced together information from anonymous Libyan footage to effectively map events. The already media savvy audience were eager to hear more tips on geo-location technology which Browne went on to outline. He emphasises the importance of investigating three questions; the source, date and location.
Browne went on to provide an example as to how his team of experts confirmed recent footage coming out of Dariya, Syria as well as how they traced the author of a video posted during the Boston Marathon bombing.
With the boundaries of investigative journalism being pushed in this way, the question of privacy became essential. Barot highlighted:
“Something these social media companies are pushing towards is that actually there is nothing wrong in being open and that privacy is a bit of an illusion.”
Evidently in Videre’s case privacy must be upheld at all costs and Greg summarised the high-tech low-tech balance well, he said:
“To understand when to use the the technology which enables you and when using it puts you and other people in danger.”
While exploring the open media platforms available to journalists is essential in todays world, Barot warned of the growing number of closed social media tools such as chat applications. While Barot could not predict what future technology in the media world would look like, he confirmed a far wider spread of mobile technology. He concluded:
“That is one of the things that is definitely going to be a big change over the next 18 months as mobile technology becomes so much more ubiquitous in the developing world.”
Watch or listen to the event here:
]]>https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/the-changing-face-of-news
In more and more places around the world it is becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous for foreign journalists to gain access and cover stories as they unfold. In the past, this often meant that events would remain unreported. This is no longer the case. User generated content (UGC) – and the innovative ways in which it is used – is creating a new way of seeing the story on the ground.
We will be joined by a panel working on the edges of the news to get the stories where conventional means have failed. They will be talking about the technology and the techniques that they use, looking at how content is verified, and how you can empower people to tell their own stories and distribute it to local and international communities.
Chaired by Richard Pendry, a lecturer in broadcast journalism at the University of Kent, where he is currently researching non-traditional news gatherers working in areas of conflict.
The panel:
Eliot Higgins is author of the Brown Moses Blog, which specialises in analysing social media produced from the conflict in Syria. His work has included uncovering smuggled Croatian arms in Syria, and in depth investigations into the August 21 sarin attack in Damascus. Twitter: @Brown_Moses
Malachy Browne is news editor with Storyful. Prior to that he created and edited Politico.ie, an Irish political website and news archive. He worked for the Irish political magazine, Village from 2006 to 2008 and was editor of the magazine’s website, Village.ie. Twitter: @malachybrowne
Videre’s head of operations, an international charity founded in 2008. They work in partnership with local activists in hard-to-access areas giving them equipment, training and support to gather visual evidence of human rights violations and other abuses. This captured footage is verified, analysed and then distributed. Twitter: @_videre
Trushar Barot is assistant editor at the Social Media and User Generated Content hub at BBC News. He has worked in the British media for the past 15 years, across newspapers, TV, radio, online, social and digital. Over the past four years he has helped develop and implement BBC News’ social media strategy, as well as helping to maintain the UGC hub’s work as an industry-leading team in social media news gathering. Twitter: @Trushar
Photograph: 1000 Words / Shutterstock.com
]]>Journalists working in areas of conflict reveal how they get information when traditional techniques are insufficient. The discussion will focus on the interaction between local hires and foreign journalists.
]]>Journalists working in areas of conflict reveal how they get information when traditional techniques are insufficient. The discussion will focus on the interaction between local hires and foreign journalists.
Local journalists are typically less conspicuous and more mobile than their foreign counterparts. They perform a vital service – bringing information from areas that are off-limits to the foreign press. Perhaps most critically for a cash-starved news industry, they are also cheaper to use than Western news gatherers.
But are they cutting corners and breaching ethics? How are the rules of reporting being rewritten by risk?
The event will be led by Richard Pendry of the University of Kent’s Centre for Journalism. While at Frontline News Television, he worked in Chechnya and across the former Soviet Union as well as Afghanistan and the Congo. He will show his film “A Strange Animal”, which focuses on the risks and rewards of adapting traditional models of news gathering. It follows local reporters in Falluja and Baghdad and looks at the phenomenon of “sub-contracting” news gathering, where local reporters pass on stories one to another when conditions are dangerous.
With:
Aamer Ahmed Khan, head of the BBC Urdu Service, has been in journalism for 25 years. He worked for the English daily newspaper The Nation in Lahore, joined the launch team of Pakistan’s first English language weekly The Friday Times as its News Editor and was special correspondent for Pakistan’s premier political magazine The Herald. He has worked with local people in Pakistan’s Tribal areas to identify the victims of US drone strikes.
Amie Ferris-Rotman, a Reuters correspondent in Kabul. She was previously a reporter in Moscow, working across the former Soviet Union covering pipeline politics, foreign policy and running stringers reporting on the Islamist insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus.
Callum Macrae, the producer/director behind Channel 4’s multi-award winning “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields”. Using mobile phone footage and other video footage from non-professional sources the film revealed the shocking truth behind the final operation against Tamil Tigers and the civilians trapped with them. The film led David Cameron to call on the UN to investigate the war crimes apparently revealed in the film. He has made films for the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and PBS and has reported and directed from around the world including Iraq, Sudan, Congo, Uganda, Cameroon and Ivory Coast.
Neil Arun, international editor who has produced a range of investigative stories during his time in Iraq, working with a bureau of local journalists. His own reporting from the country has been published by Vanity Fair and the Financial Times Weekend magazine. He also spent five years with the BBC, and has reported from the Balkans, Caucasus and Pakistan.
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In 1997, Camilla Carr and Jonathan James were kidnapped and held for fourteen months in Chechnya. Speaking neither Russian nor Chechen, armed with good intentions and a car full of toys, the two Britons had volunteered to help traumatised children in Grozny. They were soon kidnapped, and this book – The Sky is Always There: Surviving a Kidnapping in Chechnya – is a ghastly tale of casual violence and the kidnappers’ contempt for their hostages.
Many who travelled to Chechnya at this time got into trouble. A tough and resourceful Russian woman journalist I knew also worked with children in Grozny. Galya thought she knew what she was doing, but the Chechen man she most trusted betrayed her and she was taken captive. After her release, she fostered half a dozen Chechen children in her tiny flat in Moscow. She did not return to Chechnya.
Around the same time the authors and Galya were seized, I was held under armed guard while attempting to track down President Dzhokhar Dudayev in hiding. Luckily, one bearded fighter recognised me from an afternoon when we had sheltered from shellfire together. The atmosphere lightened, and we were sent on our way to Dudayev. Afterwards, I too stopped working in Chechnya.
So how did the woefully unprepared Jon and Camilla think they would get away with it? Unable to talk to their captors, the couple were reduced to making sense of their situation in their own terms. They deployed healing visualisations, yogic breathing exercises and a strategy of appeasement. They even gave the gunmen massages. One captor raped Camilla many times over a prolonged period, with Jon listening in the next room. Eventually, she made it clear that the experience was terrible. The rapist claimed to be surprised, as he ostensibly thought that western women enjoyed rape. Camilla wondered whether she should have registered her objection sooner. The couple did not ask to be kidnapped, abused and raped, but the lesson is that people should think about the risk of going into an environment already known for the likelihood of kidnapping.
This is a car crash of a book, a how-not-to essay in on working in a war zone. Much of the time, one wants to shake the authors and ask them what they thought they were doing. Jon’s dreadlocks, their massages and Camilla’s clumsy confusion of eating and toilet utensils which so appalled their captors leave the impression that the authors didn’t do their homework. Apparently, they were arrogant enough to think they didn’t have to.
Reviewer: Richard Pendry is a lecturer in broadcast journalism at the University of Kent. He reported from all over the former Soviet Union, including Chechnya, for Frontline News in the 1990s. The Sky is Always There: Surviving a Kidnapping in Chechnya by Camilla Carr and Jonathan James is published by Canterbury Press and costs £14.99