Small World News

The 2009 election in South Africa can rightly be called South Africa’s first “ICT Election.” According to a report by the Danish Technological Institute, each of South Africa’s four main parties made use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) durig campaigning. This is a really interesting report, and raises a lot of great issues.

For example, DA (Democratic Alliance) made the most innovative use of ICT and had the broadest influence. This is logical as DA, the official opposition party, has the most to gain by chipping away whomever it can from the ANC’s voter base.

At the same time, the ANC has arguable the least to gain from ICT, as the majority party, with large support from South Africa’s poorest and least connected citizens. According to DTI’s report:

The reason for this is that the voting majority does not have access to the internet, never mind to Twitter or Facebook, due to high connectivity costs, dial up or no access ICT, digital literacy and resources. This is the result of limited formal skills, resources and geographical location (e.g. remote rural areas). But also that of close to 50 million South African, according to Rick Joubert, head of Mobile Advertising at Vodacom, only 9.5 million are mobile internet users and an estimated 5 million are desktop users. This is also reflected in the ICT use of the four parties.

According to a report in the New York Times in 2005, there were 724 mobile subscribers per 1000 people in South Africa, suggesting more than 72 percent of South Africans are mobile subscribers? I find this difficult to believe, but if so, it must surely be higher today, though with some brief googling, I have been unable to find more recent reports citing numbers/percentage of users.

Another report here further hints at the availability and usage of mobile phones around Africa, particularly high in South Africa and a few other countries, such as Tanzania. Unfortunately, links to the full report appear to no longer be functioning. This wide access hints at a much greater potential for South Africans to be involved in reporting their own lives and interacting with ICT than previously considered.

The wide acceptance and implementation of ICT by the major parties is even more shocking when compared with the lack of depth and glaring lack of ICT in international coverage of the election. With such wide access to mobiles, South Africa’s election was ripe for the application of ushahidi.com and swiftapp.org to be modelled as a journalism application.

Unfortunately it appears in most cases news outlets have chosen to write something resembling editorials, quoting only officials and “analysts.” The most content provided to judge the opinions of the citizenry about their experience and opinion of the election and results are in unmoderated comment forums such as this one. Even Al-Jazeera, who made such innovative use of Ushahidi during the conflict in Gaza left much to be desired in their brief citizen journalist-style coverage.

Where are the voices of South Africans who are not members of the political class? Although some outlets such as the BBC did provide minute-by-minute coverage and even utilized Twitter and other ICT to enable citizens to contribute their experience, I am left wondering how would this election be different were the 2500+ reporters on-hand for South Africa’s momentous 1994 elections equipped with the vast array of media gathering and distributing tools available today.

Instead I’m left feeling something of deja vu for the United States recent election based more on popular misconceptions, propaganda, and puff journalism. Where are the voices of South Africa’s citizens in the international community? Where are the on-going investigative reports into Jacob Zuma and other South African politicians?

I believe the knowledge the international community needs of South Africa, and that South Africans themselves need about their political system, can only exist when South African citizens are utilizing ICT to investigate and disseminate information as skillfully as their major political parties have recently done.

The White African, Kiwanja’s FrontlineSMS, and Ushahidi are good starts. I’ll continue to think about how we can utilize their experience, in combination with African entrepreneurs such as Julius Mwelu to change the direction of international journalism in Africa and abroad.

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Alisa Miller, the head of Public Radio International, gave this talk at the November 2008 TED Conference, she succinctly describes the current state of foreign news, which is particularly driven by United States and British media companies. In four brief but enlightening minutes she paints a horrifying picture of the state of foreign news today.

Now I’d like to give you a brief look at some of the stories you’re missing, for example, what are we losing from our knowledge about the not-so-distant future of Iraq with the massive media withdrawal there?

Or in Mexico, right on our border, perhaps if we knew more about the goings-on across Mexico, rather than just on the border, we’d see a potential solution to the police and security crisis there?

During the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2008-2009, I’ll bet you didn’t hear about the destruction of one of the larger local businesses and food suppliers to Gaza residents. How would it change your outlook to have learned about that at the time?

Small World News is looking to build a network of international producers, with unique content from around the world, and change the way we look at our world. We believe we all have a stake in better understanding each other, and that can only be done by providing the international community access to news from around the world.

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Someone else has probably written this post before, but today, as I am amazed by the incredible work  votereport.in is doing to cover election day violence across India, I recognized that I too should acknowledge this key bit of technology.

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili is, according to their website:

building a platform that crowdsources crisis information. Allowing anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.

They first did this with moderate success during post-election violence that broke out in Kenya in 2008.

Since then they’ve garnered quite a bit of attention, also assisting Al Jazeera in sourcing information about events in Gaza during the 2008-2009 Israeli incursion.

Ushahidi is working on a lot of incredible projects, and best of all, they’re focused primarily in Africa, an large area of great need and with little ongoing attention from the international community. For example another one of their deployments is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, suffering from internal conflict that has been ongoing for more than a decade.

Other than its work with Al Jazeera, the project does not appear to have taken too much interest in direct work with news outlets or newsgathering. However, I’m seeing really incredible possibilities here, imagine if something like blip.tv’s API, combined with Ushahidi.

The ability to easily source and display videoclips related in physical space immediately increases our capacity for understanding the locations of these crises. Providing them an image is also a first-step toward humanizing those affected.

If we then add in a tool such as Utterli or TwitterFone to enable audio dispatches, we have empowered a whole group of other new journalists or civilians who might be involved in crowd-sourcing news, people who may not have the bandwidth or payment plan for sending video or audio, but can bring us live to the scene via interviews over their phone or daily dispatches about their lives.

The Reuters Mobile Toolkit brought a lot of promise to the future of digital media and mobile journalism, but without a platform that’s built with this kind of production specifically in mind, so far we’ve seen little in the way of revolutionary production and distribution of this type of mobile digital media content.

Sourcing Ushahidi, along with a few other key social media tools, we could build the future of news and journalism distribution right now.

Keep in mind there’s also nothing to say that the content must be mobile-produced, this is simply an added advantage that could assist professional journalists in sourcing content and perhaps exponentially improve the news and information availability to the international community.

As with many things I’ve been discussing lately, we can do this right now. What it requires is that a few investors express interest and commitment in ensuring that humanity has the tools necessary to better understand each other, and that a vast community begins to demand the information necessary to implement our vast new capability for learning from each other.

Together, utilizing social media and digital media tools available now, we can construct the platform necessary for the next phase of journalism.

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18 months ago, just a few weeks before Reuters announced its “Mobile Journalism Toolkit” ABC News made a shocking announcement to the belt-tightening world of foreign news.

ABC News was apparently “bucking the trend by creating one-person operations that will dramatically boost its coverage in Africa, India and elsewhere.” Eighteen months later, its difficult to see how ABC’s coverage has been “dramatically boosted.” It’s certainly easy to see how this may have boosted their return on investment.

In mid-August last year, the New York Times excitedly proclaimed “TV Networks Rewrite the Definition of a News Bureau.” Unfortunately these types of articles continue to be code words for restructuring plans aimed at increased revenue with decreased risk and outlay of capital.

The Boston Globe and other papers’ recent closures of their foreign bureaus have demonstrated that this is not an issue that is isolated to television news coverage. As events like Somali Pirate hijackings, mass farmer suicides, and the crumbling of State power in key strategic areas like the Swat valley demonstrate, Globalization means a world where we have more, not less, need to understand the nuances of the world around us.

These are not issues that snuck up on us. Let us not permit any world leader, academic, or news company president or CEO excuse themselves with a “Woe are we the shocked and surprised. We could never have seen this coming.”

Unfortunately, in 1993, a year before the Rwandan genocide, there was a reason we “never saw it coming” as many have been so quick to claim. That reason? There were only three television networks with bureaus anywhere in Africa, CNN, Reuters, and BBC World Television-which did not broadcast into the United States. In 1993 and 1994, CNN’s sole correspondent for covering the entire northern half of Africa was Gary Streiker, who produced the only piece from Burundi during bloodshed that left an estimated 50,000 dead after the assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye.

Fast forward to 1994, when there were never more than 15 reporters in Rwanda to witness these atrocities – though no fewer than 2500 were celebrating the birth of South Africa’s new democracy a little further south. Although hindsight is 20/20, its not difficult to see why the world never knew what was coming in Rwanda.

In 2000, a panel of African and American journalists at the Smithsonian Institution gathered to discuss and largely condemn the failure of news agencies to adequately cover the entirety of the African continent.

In 2003, the American Journalism Review predicted, quite accurately it appears, looking back more than 5 years later, that it would become a vicious circle: When the public knows less about places in Africa or Asia or Central America, then it is going to demand less, and then the networks say the people aren’t interested, and that becomes the pretext for dropping off.”

Now let’s take a look at that revolution that ABC News told us was coming, where they’d be able to re-invigorate their foreign news coverage by sending one-man-bands to Mumbai, Nairobi, and others. Let’s take a look at ABC News’ own “world” or “International” section. Despite this revolution in digital news-making, we find that out of the top three articles on Wednesday evening / Thursday morning in the United States, one is an ABC “GMA Exclusive,” one is an article by “Spiegel Online,” and the third is an AP report.

Looking further at ABC’s coverage doesn’t improve their standing. Of the ten stories below, 7 are wire stories, two are fluff pieces, one about a 47 year-old woman on American Idol, and one a video piece about “Diet Shoes,” and the tenth piece, photos from the Somali hijacking, weren’t even produced by a journalist, but are sourced from a “crew member of the U.S. flagged Maersk Alabama.”

All of this begs the question, where is the media revolution we’ve been promised? I’m here to tell you not to worry, because its coming. But its not coming from the old media agencies, and its not coming in the form of tech news, or entertainment news, or cute girl talks about X news. The only way it will happen is if the need to be adequately informed about our world, our politicians, our enemies, the global threats, becomes a funding priority for everyone.

What is our expected return on investment? I can’t tell you that yet with certainty, at least not in financial terms. What I can tell you is that funding local producers to create content for the international community may help prevent the next genocide, the next growing terror threat, the next ecological disaster.

It may mean that the world takes notice before 1500 more farmers commit suicide due to lack of access to water, or worse, became suicidal soldiers seeking vengeance.

What if the return was world peace?

How much would you invest toward the eventual goal of world peace? That is the kind of return I’m talking about, the ability to sleep better at night, knowing your funding a better world for your children, a world where we can’t kill each other, because we understand each other.

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The television media was covering the abduction of one Captain Richard Phillips almost non-stop over the week leading up to Easter. When it was announced that 3 of the 4 pirates holding the captain were killed and he was rescued, the commentators on all the major networks exploded in an orgy of nationalist hoo-rah fervor. They succeeded in showing they could Faux News with the best of them.

They did not succeed, however, in helping us better understand the Somali piracy issue. What might a news agency need to provide insight into the causes of Somali pirac? First of all, they need you the viewer/reader/listener/audience to take a vested interest in learning more about Somalia’s pirates, or pirates in general.

Somalia is a great example of a situation where pirates have a very clear cause and a very clear, though incredibly difficult, solution.

But as I was saying, let’s imagine we have a news agency funded initially through small investment or foundation money. If we establish a bureau in Nairobi, we can cover many subjects in sub-Saharan east Africa. One of the easiest ses of tools available to mobile journalists was presented in the form of the Reuters Mobile Toolkit. Unfortunately, in the last 18 months since it was made public, we’ve seen little in the way of new and innovative journalism being done with these basic tools.

So this is where I suggest a new way to create media, community funded and supported, i.e. community invested news. This has been discussed before, here for example. I’m just going to take the idea, and suggest how we can apply it, in this case to learning more about Somali pirates.

Let’s assume we’ve funded the equipment for a team based in Nairobi-more about how to fund that in a later post, but my previous model for Afghanistan looks a bit similar to what I’ll be proposing.

So, imagine if you could tweet your own questions for Somali pirates and have them answered via audio or perhaps even video within a few days? We can do that right now, utilizing skype, mobile phone networks, and even Utterli or drop.io. When news came that the pirates were killed and Captain Phillips freed, our correspondent in Harardhere could have provided immediate access to the response of locals in the pirate village. Viewers at home could have asked their own questions of the locals supported by Somalia’s pirate economy.

In the days after Captain Phillips was freed, rather than speculation about the potential for Somalia’s pirates to band to join forces with Islamist militias, rather than interviewed so-called “experts” about what might or might not happen, our community-funded team could be asking local residents.

The most affordable form they could be producing content in would be text blogging. With the support of the audience, our local producer will be able to produce audio, video, photo, or perhaps more interactive reports. The quality, and quantity of coverage depends on the audience’ level of interest and willingness to support.

Wouldn’t you like to know that you could influence Anderson Cooper, Brian Williams, or Keith Olbermann’s coverage? With Small World News, of course you have a say in the coverage, because you’ll help write our paychecks.

As always, please email us or leave a comment below, especially if you have assistance or advice to offer!

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