We’ve been getting tons of news on Global Voices about how activists and bloggers are using the web to distribute information from Myanmar after the cyclone, including numerous citizens videos of the devastation. The situation is obviously incredibly serious, although you wouldn’t know it from reading the state-run newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar.
Only one week after the cyclone, you had to leaf ahead to page 4 before it was even mentioned. What was on the front page instead? “The dictator, and his wife, casting their votes in the constitutional referendum that he didn’t see fit to postpone,” writes the New Mandala blog. Check out the pictures.
Thank you internet, for these simple illustrations of reality.
Okay, the Saturday Night Live video below is sort of funny as satire, but ends on a pretty serious note. Up until recently, everyone seemed to be patting each other on the back congratulating America for not playing up Obama’s race or Hillary’s gender as an issue. I think Hillary’s campaign has helped change this. If he talked about “male” voters, as much as she talks about “white working class voters”, I think it would become more apparent to us.
Two articles this week help illustrate, what I unfortunately think we may see more of in the near future. One, is from the Washington Post talking about different racist comments encountered by Obama campaign staffers. And the other is from Clint Hendler at the Columbia Journalism Review, explaining how many journalists don’t provide the necessary framing to stop people from getting away with “para-racism”. It’s a constructive argument and a critical reminder of how important the press is in setting the tone of the debate.
The para-racial attacks on Obama won’t stop as he turns towards the general. When they happen, reporting on them is a good thing. When they are false, debunking them is vital. But explaining them is right.
Paying for content on the web is pretty unpopular these days. Luckily for free content providers, ad sales online seem to be picking up. Lots of bloggers, non-profit websites and others, put free Google Ads or similar money-earning services on their sites. The user agreement for Google Ads (and probably others too) stipulates you aren’t allowed to ask people to click on them. That makes sense to avoid cheating. But isn’t it funny how no one seems to think of clicking on ads as a free form of charity?
In the past weeks, I have very unscientifically been asking friends who work in media and on the web, whether they ever consciously click on ads of the websites they like to read in order to help support them. So far everyone has said no. I don’t actually do it myself either.
Years ago, the Hunger Site (a website of GreaterGood) started getting people to click on ads, by promising to sponsor “a cup of rice” to the UN world food program. It was a runaway success, and they have since expanded to other issues like breast cancer, child health, literacy, the environment and animal rescue. The principle is simple, everybody gets it.
There is so much impetus on the side of the media companies and advertisers to lure people to click on their ads. Services like Revver (for profit sharing on online video) have built whole businesses around it. But so far, I haven’t heard of any reader’s movement to help fund their favorite websites by purposefully clicking on and looking at automatically generated ads. Why not? If people genuinely look at the ads it seems to work to everyone’s best interest.
So now that the right-wing media have had a go at Barack Obama about his Pastor, now the left-wing media is having a go at John McCain’s crazy pastor too (although it’s not really clear whether it really is his pastor or just a guy he shook hands with on stage).
Brave New Films invites you to meet: Rev. Rod Parsley, the televangelist megachurch pastor from Ohio who hates Islam. According to David Corn of Mother Jones, Parsley has called on Christians to wage war against Islam, which he considers to be a “false religion.” In the past, Parsley has also railed against the separation of church and state, homosexuals, and abortion rights, comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis.
Wow. He sounds friendly.
On Beliefnet, David Gibson seems to regret that political leaders in the US are forced to create a distance between themselves and their religion to make themselves electable (he is talking about Obama not McCain).
Seems more to me like they are forced to align themselves with one crazy faith or another to even be considered for nomination. I wish America’s leaders wouldn’t lend credibility to all the nonsense that goes on in the name of faith.
It’s wonderful to have friends on the internet. In addition to two musical birthday cards, several Facebook wall posts, and a couple of old-fashioned text emails, I have also received an imaginary “dodo cake with coelocanth frosting”, a disturbingly festive song, a video interview with an artist, a poem that starts “she’s got 99 problems but years ain’t one”. A special treat were “happy birthdays” from Global Voices authors in Spanish, English, Danish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Chichewa, Malagasy, and more. Thank you everyone!
During the Media Re:Public conference in Los Angeles a little over a week ago, I was asked to come up with a 2-minute “provocation” about the future of news for a panel moderated by Jonathan Zittrain. Ethan summarized what all the panelists said.
I actually thought it was a pretty tame prediction, but I spent the rest of the day dodging journalists and editors who wanted to tell me I was wrong, naive, and even careless. Meanwhile younger colleagues were eager to tell me I was absolutely right. My friend Sameer Padania even rolled his eyes at me and said, “Have you even read the report I wrote? That’s exactly what I’ve been saying.” He’s not kidding. You can read it here. My favorite quote is attributed to Channel 4 reporter Sorious Samura, “When will foreign correspondents be foreign?”
I started with an anecdote, about a BBC World radio story broadcast to my California rental car radio. It was about a press tour organized by the Chinese authorities for foreign journalists to enter Tibet. The BBC was not invited, so the reporter interviewed a USA Today journalist about how the event had been interrupted by Tibetan monks protesting. Obviously what is happening between Tibet and China right now is very serious, but I still find this particular story silly. The journalist was reporting about a staged media event he hadn’t even been to, and his main source was another Western journalist.
I’m not targeting the BBC or this particular journalist in particular (he must have filed hundreds of different stories, and maybe even speaks Chinese). I just think the fact that a story like this is considered newsworthy is pretty depressing (especially since it must have been reported by a ton of other journalists already).
How many more years will we have to watch foreign correspondents parachute into a region and pretend they know what’s going on? How many more reports coming out of the Middle East from hotel rooftops will be delivered by people who do not speak Arabic, or know what “the Green zone” in Iraq was called before coalition forces arrived?
Not for long, is what I think. There are too many alternatives, and I’m not even referring to bloggers around the world. The type of thing we do at Global Voices is meant to be a service to professional journalists.
The founder of Alive in Baghdad, a fantastic video website that broadcasts weekly reports by Iraqi journalists, once told me in New York that he has a hell of a time getting news media organizations to recognize that his crew aren’t “citizen journalists” but actually, real, professional journalists who just happen to be Iraqi.
Sooner or later, qualified local perspectives will become what people prefer to hear, rather than what editors defer to when a situation becomes too dangerous for Western journalists to report from. It’s wrong not to have news from a faraway place, simply because there is no longer money to fly foreign correspondents there.
The internet has the effect of making international journalists even more accountable to global audiences that before. Just see Global Voices’ current China coverage. Yikes. Chinese bloggers are pouncing all over Western media inaccuracies. On openDemocracy, articles by authors from the region offer background on political history and media misunderstandings.
When the panel discussion in Los Angeles ended, the BBC’s wonderful Richard Sambrook graciously stood up and agreed with with some of what I said. In his own blog he wrote, “I agree the model of Foreign Correspondent is becoming rapidly outdated and needs re-inventing, not least to have authenticity with the subject which is lacking from many blow-dried parachute journalists.” Sambrook also noted that the BBC regularly uses over 400 “local stringers” around the world.
I think this just helps show that the end of what I consider old-fashioned foreign correspondence is coming closer. It’s not about where a journalist is born or not, it’s about listening and respecting people who are different, and trusting them to have the integrity to describe their own situation. I’m not saying it’s easier. But it could be better.
Here’s a brief report on American foreign media consumption. The part about Anna Nicole Smith is of course the most interesting… Robin from Snarkmarket sent it to me.
I am currently at a conference hosted by the Berkman Center and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, at the USC Annenberg School of Communications. The point is to talk about how we can merge new and traditional media in ways that can improve society. It is also presented as an occasion for the the MacArthur foundation to think about how they should shape their media funding in the future.
Lots of interesting people here, and halfway through the day. I’m sitting in a session with nine (?!) of people on the panel, and it’s developing more or less as a conversation. Jeez Berkman, your panels have almost no women on them.
Michael Smolens from DotSub gave an introductory presentation, about how his project is trying to break down language barriers. He told me yesterday that they are launching an update to the website soon, and that you will now be able to view DotSub videos with subtitles in any language on iPhones. This is what they are working on right now: Pangea Day.
Caramba, Global Voices is getting mentioned on every single panel today. And I haven’t said a single word.
Smolens used a Global Voices post as a key example of how subtitles can become a powerful vehicle for distribution. He showed a post written by Chris Salzberg in Japan a couple of months ago, about a video of a Japanese nuclear reactor leak. Chris added English subtitles to the video. It was picked up by whistle-blower site, Wikileaks, and from there it was Slashdotted, jamming DotSub’s servers for several hours.
In his presentation, Mark Jones from Reuters, is frank about the difficulty of convincing “old media” colleagues about the ability to trust Global Voices (for instance) as “authenticators of content”, and says he often brings up Global Voices’ Harvard origins to help persuade them (we, in turn, tend to mention our Reuters friendship). His point is that part of the challenge of getting “old media” to interact with “new media” is developing new mechanisms of trust and authentication. Ivan Sigal, who is also on the panel, suggests this might be helped along by “old media” being more honest and open about their own methods and limitations.
My favorite thing about these conferences is learning about new projects and seeing the people behind them. One brand new project I hadn’t seen before, is Vocalo. An idea to allow people to upload audio reports via telephone to the web, and have them broadcast on local public radio in Northwest Indiana and Chicago. Neat.
And now, lunch.
My colleague, Ethan Zuckerman is doing an incredible job (as usual) of live-blogging what people are talking about. He’s a much faster typer and thought-digester than I am. Oh, and if you want to hear what he sounds like, Ethan and I were interviewed together on Radio Open Source recently.
A Danish climber is interviewed in this heart-breaking film on The Hub that shows Chinese soldiers killing Tibetans on their way to see the Dalai Lama in India.
On Global Voices, John Kennedy is keeping track of new information on the riots in Tibet and the Chinese crack-down in this post. Snippets of news are coming out via micro-blogs like Twitter, but otherwise it’s mostly Chinese who are uploading comments.
Kennedy says:
**One reader has written in asking to know why there are no apparent Tibetan voices in this post. This of course is not a deliberate omission but a problem of not being able to find them. Any such related links if left in the comments or sent to chinese [at] globalvoicesonline [dot] org will be translated swiftly and everyone’s help is most welcome in this.
