What's your story?

Everyone has a story to tell. That’s the premise of BBC Capture Wales, a project enabling people to create digital shorts about their real-life experiences using their own photos, words and voices. The tales provide snapshots into the lives of ordinary people, sometimes revealing depths of experience often missed in the humdrum of daily life, like this one.

As well as creating beautiful, bold stories, one of the main drives of the project is to improve digital literacy. In a world where sounds and images increasingly rule, director of the project Daniel Meadows counts the ability to communicate in these ways as the basic literacy of our age. In fact he directly correlates social and digital inclusion by pointing to high levels of digital illiteracy among the unemployed.

These ideas reminded me of a similar project I came across in Kenya. Slum TV is a Nairobi-based film project documenting life in Mathare, the country’s largest and most dangerous slum. Since it began just a year ago it's emerged as a means for young locals to express themselves and initiate dialogue both within and outside their community. Like Capture Wales, a group of volunteer ‘facilitators’ teach the technological and storytelling skills needed for the young journalists to produce their own material. And what they produce are intimate stories from the inside: tales and perspectives that the national, let alone the international, media could never access.

Back in Wales, Daniel Meadows stresses that to make participatory journalism like this work, there’s an absolute need that what is made is shared. Equally, vital parts of Slum TV are the regular public screenings shown to Mathare’s residents. I was lucky enough to be at the very first screening, projected from the back of a pick-up truck onto a huge whitewashed wall in the heart of the slum. The project’s founding idea that the camera ‘always attracts attention’ never rang more true as hundreds of residents crammed into a makeshift clearing, all eyes glued to the images flickering on the wall.

That was in October 2007, three months later Kenya was to erupt in a storm of post-election violence. Mathare, home to almost 500,000 people from different tribes, was to bear some of the worst of this violence as residents took up arms against each other. It was in the midst of this that Slum TV really proved its worth both inside and outside the community. The volunteers began recording the bloodshed through the eyes of those living within it, offering unparalleled human perspectives of the crisis to the outside world. Below is the first part of an Al Jazeera special report on what the Slum TV journalists got up to:



At the same time, Kenyan citizen journalists began to collaborate on a web-based platform called Ushahidi, meaning ‘testimony’ in Swahili. It’s goal was to crowd-source crisis information by allowing anyone to submit information via mobile texts, email or, interestingly, social networking sites like twitter and Facebook. It took just two days to launch Ushahidi and immediately it began bridging the gap between relief efforts and distress calls from around the country. User-generated reports were collected and then visualized on the Internet using Google maps, giving a more accurate picture of what was happening on the ground and helping direct emergency aid to affected areas.

Similar technology was used after Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, but the fact that this happened in Africa amazes and excites me. Since January 2008, the same platform has been employed in South Africa to monitor and map anti-immigrant violence in the early summer of 2008. And I don’t expect this to be the last occasion it’s used. The implications of this kind of citizen journalism are huge and I hope they’ll change the way complex crises in the news are communicated and understood by the wider world.

Capture Wales, Slum TV and Ushahidi prove that if you give people the tools and the knowledge to use them, they will, because within us all it seems there’s a story waiting to be told.

User-generated controversy

Many journalists feel threatened by the increasing amount of ‘user-generated content’ in mainstream news. At the same time, the demands of our ‘24-hour breaking news’ culture ensure that traditional media organizations are ever more reliant on images taken at the scene of an event by a camera-wielding public. Perhaps the quality is a bit poor, but this just makes the footage all the more authentic. After all, whose images do we most vividly remember from the London bombings or the Asian tsunami?

This is hardly a new phenomenon – perhaps the most famous example of ‘citizen’ journalism is the amateur video capturing the assassination of JFK. As technology and the Internet become more available, I expect we’ll see an increase in first-account images and stories that paid journalists have no chance of scooping themselves.

So does this mean that anyone with a camera and access to the Internet is a potential journalist, or are they simply witnesses with recordable eyes? I’d veer towards the latter, as it’s the journalists who have the time to follow up, research and refine the facts that turn the images into a story. Except that now it’s user-generated words, not images that are unnerving the media world.

The public voice is heard no more loudly than on USG ‘citizen’ journalism sites like allvoices, Helium or CNN’s iReport. A recent hoax post on iReport – claiming that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack – led to freefall of Apple shares on the US financial market and served to highlight one of the most serious criticisms of this type of news: what, if any, code of ethics do these ‘journalists’ work by? And more importantly, can they be trusted?

Clearly such sites are a leap forward for the freedoms of both speech and information – Helium’s motif ‘learn what you need, share what you know’ summarizes their worth. But, can we really just rely on the ‘self-correcting nature’ of these sites put forward by web journalists like Jeff Jarvis? After all, they argue, it never takes too long for a hoax to be uncovered – but is this really good enough? I don’t think many Apple shareholders would agree.

I’d like to see more new sites incorporating voting systems like those on Digg and Slashdot where readers rate their favourite, and likely, most trusted contributors. Perhaps in the future there’ll be more that take the Huffington Post model only giving out passwords to ‘syndicated’ contributors.

The potential of user-generated content is enormous. Most obviously, there's just so much news, and this news covers enormous ground, territory that traditional outlets often lack time, resources or will to explore. The very fact that there are so many users engaged with what’s going on around them and interacting is great, not just for democracy, but for a more cohesive society. Talk of censorship is disturbing but complaints will continue to be raised when content fails to fall in line with traditional media standards.

As demand for USG increases, the media using the material must avoid encouraging citizen journalists, keen to see their footage on the television or in the paper, into potentially dangerous situations to which they would never send their own staff. Ultimately, for the two streams to co-exist and feed positively off one another, both the amateurs and the professionals need to find ways that ensure responsible output without sacrificing quality for quantity.

Patch Web 2.0

The news consumer, to borrow a phrase, has never had it so good. Initially, the Internet’s phase Web 1.0 allowed us to multi-source news by foraging among media outlets from town to country, from print to broadcast, for nothing more than a few clicks on a mouse. Then along came its sequel – ‘interactive’ Web 2.0 – bringing the opportunity not just of browsing, but of being browsed. We the consumer now had the tools to create and share our news and opinions on platforms such as blogs and Wikis, as well as on video-sharing and social-networking sites like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.

Great news for most, but what exactly have these changes meant for journalists? Well, I’ve recently started studying journalism at the University of Cardiff and, like any working journalist, have been assigned my patch. Of course, my research began scanning websites and search engines but has gradually branched into territories previously unknown: I’m now finding my bearings in a new world of RSS feeding, book-marking, twitter-following and now, blogging. In fact, Web 2.0 networks provide an extension of my patch on the ground, a vital source to be kept close, consulted and worked upon.

So Web 2.0 is broadening the scope for journalists looking to generate and refine their stories. Passive media consumption is a thing of the past. Through web pages such as the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ or the BBC’s ‘Have Your Say’, the public can now communicate their views and expertise to the audience, and to the reporter.

And so we can start to see journalism as being ‘a process, not a product’. These are the words of David Cohn, a journalist making his career developing the very practice of open source journalism. This intimacy between reporters and their audience creates a two-way process that makes journalists set their stories free. The final copy is now nothing of the sort. Audience feedback and exchange force the journalist to really listen and, in turn, to do a better job. As the Guardian’s Emily Bell explains, such collaboration can bring to a story the depth of ‘insider knowledge, with an outsider’s perspective’.

For Jeff Jarvis, the changing relationship that a journalist has with the audience and with the story should not mean 'surrendering control of the process'. Specifically, he suggests the journalist act as 'curator' so that dogmatic or offensive posts are simply edited out. In his words, we must figure out 'who the smart people are'. And perhaps he's right. Why shouldn't we oust those who use such platforms to rant, and make way for opinion that moves the debate along?

Or maybe the way forward is to educate the contributing audience à Le Monde. The French newspaper is confronting the online problem in a different way. They are appointing an editorial 'coach' to improve the standards of their contributors' postings.

Whichever line you take it is clear that the journalist's role hasn't actually changed so very much. It is still their job to filter information, in this case from forum feeds and blogs, and then to select the most significant aspects they find to inform their work. After all, we cannot assume that the unheard and silent majority not sharing their views online are any less engaged with the issues than those who are.