]]> http://www.solanasaurus.com/2008/05/13/global-voices-citizen-media-summit/feed/ 0 http://www.solanasaurus.com/2008/04/08/in-2013-there-will-be-no-foreign-correspondents/ http://www.solanasaurus.com/2008/04/08/in-2013-there-will-be-no-foreign-correspondents/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:26:25 +0000 solanasaurus http://www.solanasaurus.com/?p=356 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.

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.

(I am sure he is happy now that Radio Open Source has put a much, much nicer picture of him to accompany the story.)

There are few subjects that spark the imagination of bloggers worldwide – and United States foreign policy is one of them.

Global Voices challenges people to listen to people beyond their own borders. We translate back and forth from blogospheres in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe in hopes that people may come to understand and care for one another across borders.

We also encourage international media to talk to and report on the concerns of ordinary citizens around the world. Hopefully, looking at US politics more closely through a kaleidoscope of world blogs will be a compelling and thought-provoking experience. Send us links to blogs you would like us to link to, including your own.

Global Voices Middle East and North Africa Editor, Amira Al Hussaini is going to be editing the website with help from other Global Voices editors and volunteers. Check in regularly at Voices Without Votes until Americans finally hit the polls and elect a president in November 2008.

Meanwhile, the world is still talking! Are you listening?

More than enough silliness coming out of Fox these days to keep this site busy: Fox Attacks. Barak Obama refused to go on Fox for months, but this morning (in spite of a petition for him and Edwards to refuse the network) he granted an interview to the show, Fox & Friends about the New Hampshire primary.

CNN just asked their correspondents around the world to report on the US, and they nearly all said people around the world were cheering for Obama (especially in Kenya). The only exception was in Ramallah, where the correspondent said people were not in the least optimistic about any of the candidates.

Global Voices has a couple of reports about Obama from Iranian and Caribbean bloggers, and we’ve got another global round up planned for later today. How depressing, that the fact that a candidate is popular abroad could actually work against him in the United States… When you think back to all the global negativity about Bush in 2004, it’s really startling that he still won.

Right now, in Israel, bloggers are upset that President Bush’s current visit to Israel is costing taxpayers an astonishing $25,000 an hour, among other things.

And that is pretty much how the conference call did not go.

Me and five other Global Voices bloggers were given the opportunity to ask questions of these incredible human rights leaders who have recently joined forces with other great leaders as The Elders. The conference call system was very bad, and we didn’t all get to ask the questions we prepared, but the conversation was fluid, and the Elders on the line were genuine and friendly. I’ve written more about what they said on openDemocracy and Global Voices. Hopefully, next time there is such a call, hundreds more bloggers could listen in.

The Elders want to reach out to bloggers because they’ve launched a campaign to help “reclaim human rights for individuals”. It’s called Every Human Has Rights and it involves getting around a billion people to sign the Declaration of Human Rights (go sign, you’ll be impressed to read the plain text version). They’re also asking people and groups to upload human rights videos to The Hub.

So much gets hidden in the world of NGOs, IGOs, conferences and summits, that reaching out to ordinary citizens (or “extraordinary,” as Tutu says) is key. Technology is enabling people everywhere to document and broadcast their own life situations via websites like Global Voices and The Hub. It’s exactly the ammunition human rights leaders need to help push for change.

It’s remarkable that citizen media has come this far. When global heroes like the ones above are asking bloggers for their help, advice, and attention, it means there’s real power there to be tapped. We need to think hard about what more we can do to amplify the voices of people around the world who really need to be heard.

One way to begin is to listen.

It’s a huge scandal where a major company selling health supplements (the active ingredient is ants) has filed for bankruptcy taking thousands of workers’ personal investments in ant farming equipment down the drain.

Pictures, videos, and forum comments posted on Chinese websites are quickly being removed by the authorities, but John and other bloggers are copying and translating them on other sites before they disappear forever.

More than 11,000 people in China have visited the post already.

I blogged about this already in Danish on blogbyblog.dk – but anyone with a good idea for a blogging project in a “marginalized” community, should write it up and submit it to Rising Voices – the new Global Voices outreach project run by my colleague David Sasaki. We are giving out grants of max $5000 to the best projects. Deadline for application is November 30. The application process is styled like a group brainstorm in a wiki (see instructions). So far Rising Voices grantees include a blogging workshop in El Alto, Bolivia, a group blog at a school for women in Bangladesh, and an urban library blogging project in Colombia. Can’t wait to see what this next round of applications will lead to…