Mohamed Nanabhay from Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Vincent Maher from South Africa’s Mail & Guardian argue that the adoption by mainstream media of “social media” is what will reload citizen journalism. This is the note on which the Digital Citizen Indaba conference about blogging came to an end.
Mohamed Nanabhay from Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Vincent Maher from South Africa’s Mail & Guardian argue that the adoption by mainstream media of “social media” is what will reload citizen journalism. This is the note on which the Digital Citizen Indaba conference about blogging came to an end.
Mohamed Nanabha spoke here in Grahamstown, South Africa during the Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI) to draw some attention to what he calls the “new Al JazeEra”. The journalist from this global TV network says that only two things count when trying to take advantage of technology to get a stories out: Contribution & distribution.
VIDEO of Mohamed Nanabhay’s presentation at the DCI
Distribution is a pretty obvious one, at least for Al Jazeera. Even though it’s competing with the likes of CNN, BBC News, Al Arabiya and now Telesur (is Venezuela’s Telesur really a competitor as of today? Not sure…), it still enjoys a relatively lonely journey in the Middle East.
That’s due to the “first mover advantage” certainly, but necessarily also endless financial resources. But it’s not about this distribution that Nanabhay wanted to insist on. He rather argued in favour of a distribution mode that will increasingly go online.
Al Jazeera is being listened to in cafés, in groups, it’s a collective experience. But in the "West", Nanabhay argues, people consume news much more individually and this is precisely the market segment the new Al Jazeera seems to be after. By “new” he means interactive… which echoes his second point: contribution.
Many of Al Jazeera’s programmes and news feeds are already on the popular video platform YouTube. Although contribution is limited to posting comments or adding videos of your own making, Nanabhay already feels that this new mode of using and producing the news changes how it is received by any critical audience. “New gatekeepers of information is one question this new interaction brings up.”
Nanabhay insisted on how his media organisation is starting to move to more participation of the public but it’s still to be seen whether the style of reporting will “listen” to the comments and feedback provided by YouTube visitors. There are chances that this will not materialise as journalistic constraints and standards, especially in TV production, are relatively set and do have an impact on content.
“It’s all about quality”
In a quite controversial speech, Vincent Maher of the Mail & Guardian Online responded to Nanabhay. He did not inisist on the fact that there is absolutely nothing new about interacting more intensively with a media’s audience (although this would have been welcome at this point… the mainstream media seem to like to disregard the fact that community media and independent media activists have been engaged in participatory journalism for ages…).
Maher close off the panel on innovation, which was meant to discuss “Web 2.0 and the Media”, by “skyping” with himself on a gigantic screen. He had prerecorded a voice over IP interview in which he tells the audience that the dream of “our media” is dead. He went on to ask a few provoking questions: Aren’t we just reinforcing our bias? Aren’t we creating just more or less diversity? Aren’t we just hearing wealthy, well-educated voices?
And I must admit I liked this, because these are definitely tough questions bloggers and all the new Web 2.0 people need to ask themselves. I would add this one: Aren’t we just talking to ourselves?
“Web 2.0, blogging, citizen journalism does not necessarily mean that those who are marginalised will be given a voice or use it,” Maher continued. “How can we accurately reflect the different cultural environments?”
And his answer is rooted in platforms like the one he is working on currently, called Amatomu. Also subtitled “The South African blogosphere, sorted,” this platform accepts and promotes blogging, but organises it. The “lack of credibility” of blogging in general is what hinders a more widespread and mainstream readership to hop on the wagon of citizen journalism. “It’s all about quality,” Maher insisted.
“People out there don’t want to do the job of an editor or a journalist,” and this is why Maher and his team at South Africa’s leading independent newspaper Mail & Guardian have invested time and energies to come up with useful web platforms, associated with the paper, organised by it, but not created by it. This is, by the way, a clever way to “make money” with blogging.
Bloggers are invited to the party, but the editor is the Mail & Guardian. Again, this is based on the premise that the audience wants quality and not necessarily democracy, in this media. A quite controversial position in these times of fervent and religious following of Web 2.0 principles and other “social media” buzzes.
Maher reiterated what other bloggers at the Digital Citizen Indaba also said, which is that blogging is especially useful to journalists for argumentation, opinion writing. “Journalists will not blog until they receive feedback.”
Even though the legal aspect, the style and the ideology that’s often embedded in feedback make the process (of editing while including what the audience says) long, it has worked in many cases for the journalists of the Mail & Guardian involved.
And what’s more, Maher concluded his lively speech by saying that only by the adoption of social media by mainstream media will citizen journalism survive.
This, with all due respect, is over the top. What a bad finish! There are plenty of independent platforms that give citizens a voice and they don’t have to be mainstream or commercial in any way!