Some success stories of citizen journalism

On Friday, the last day of the training, Maggid took over as facilitator for most of the day. He was showing to the participants how he runs his blog and teaching about some of the settings available on Blogger.

He also launched a lively debate about the quality of Tanzanian media reporting taking as an example the case of an elder in Loliondo in Ngorongoro district, Arusha region, who has received huge publicity in the mainstream media for allegedly curing people from HIV and any other diseases by letting them taste a special herbal drink made from the toxic bark of the local mugariga tree, or upas in English.

During the last session, I introduced to the participants some more websites, starting with Huffington Post, which was originally just a personal blog of the American journalist Arianna Huffington. In just a few years Huffington Post has developed to become a prominent online publication with a huge following in the USA. The other week, the site was sold for 315 million dollars to the internet conglomerate AOL.

I also showed two blogs from Iraq which became famous during the war and the early years of the American occupation of the country. The blogs of Salaam Pax and a young Iraqi lady calling herself Riverbend gave readers around the world a direct taste of what life was in the country plagued with military raids, power cuts and water shortages and local extremist militias taking control in the streets.

The neighbouring Kenya has also produced some great examples on how to use a blog for constructive and social purposes, or narrative creativity. For well-known Kenyan blogs, see Kenyan Pundit, Thinker’s Room, or A Kenyan Urban Narrative, a more literary blog maintained by the codename Potashius Nairobus.

AfriGadget is a writers’ collective reporting on local inventions from all parts of Africa, a boat made of plastic bottles, toy vehicles built from recycled trash materials, a porridge cooking robot, or a phone charger using the power from a bicycle’s dynamo.

Mzalendo, a Kenyan Parliament Watch, was a blog launched before the country’s elections in 2007 to report what the Kenyan MP’s were actually doing, and not doing. Readers were invited to send in their contributions for publication.

Then, during the ethnic clashes following the Kenyan elections, the web service Ushahidi was introduced allowing people to send in alerts of unreported attacks and need for assistance. The site was simply using the Google Maps to visualize the killings in Western Kenya and Rift Valley. Later, the Ushahidi platform has been applied also for reporting crime in Atlanta or humanitarian needs after the earthquake in Haiti.

Another eminent example of citizen journalism is the South Korean Ohmy News, an online newspaper where all the stories are produced by ordinary citizens, often the best experts in the affairs of their own geographic locations or interest areas.

Just two examples how the established media has reacted to the challenges of citizen journalism:

BBC was the first big news company to ask their readers to send in their photos for publication. That happened during the London Underground bombings in July 2005. The editors understood that the readers who happened to be at the place of the bombings and were carrying mobile phones with inbuilt cameras were the only potential source to provide pictures from the bombings.

The other example is more like a curiosity on how to attract the interest of younger readers who otherwise would shun away from the mainstream news coverage about political or economic or global topics. The American ICT magazine Wired produced an online game to explain the social and economic backgrounds of the piracy off the coast of Somalia. In the game, the player is running a Somali pirate operation, and really needs strategic thinking to be able to accomplish the mission with profitable results.