Citizen Journalism

 

 

 

Summary

 

"Citizen journalism" can help move the country towards peace. Through web-based technologies, even citizens in Sri Lanka who have been effectively cut out of mainstream media - bursting, as it is, with the propaganda of political elites - have found new ways of expressing themselves, their concerns, their aspirations and their ideas for resolving conflict. Often, this new age of citizen journalism lacks the grammar of age-old diplomacy and socio-political norms - the conversation is raw, visceral, impatient, irreverent, pithy, provocative. In Sri Lanka, it is a conversation that's largely still in English, and also limited to urban centres. The potential of citizen journalism, however, is its ability to provide a forum for all citizens - male and female, of all ethnicities, castes, classes and religions - to express themselves freely, society will better accommodate ideas and measures that engender peace."

 

Excerpt from The Promise of Citizen Journalism by Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation, published on Madrid11, January 2007.

 

 

 

Resources

 

Centre for Citizen Media

http://citmedia.org/

 

Center for Citizen Media is a new initiative aimed at helping to enable and encourage grassroots media, especially citizen journalism, at every level.

 

http://citmedia.org/principles

In this special section our goal is to detail the bedrock foundations of journalism to help citizen reporters grasp the fundamentals of the craft in a networked age. We've interviewed citizen media publishers and thought leaders in an effort to flesh out the core values and tenets of quality journalism at the grassroots level. We're not saying that bloggers must follow these guidelines. We are saying that if you're committed to practicing journalism online, these principles deserve your attention. We hope you'll participate in this ongoing conversation.

 

 

Groundviews and Vikalpa

http://www.groundviews.lk | http://www.vikalpa.org

Groundviews is Sri Lanka's first and only tri-lingual citizens journalism website features a wide range of articles on humanitarian issues, media freedom, human rights, peace, democracy, constitutional reform and governance. Through the publication of alternative narratives on conflict transformation, democracy, good governance and peace in Sri Lanka, Vikalpa aims to showcase voices and opinions rarely featured in mainstream media in the vernacular. Both sites demonstrate the commitment of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), Colombo, Sri Lanka to critique and strengthen governance and democracy through citizen journalism and new media and are also rare examples of citizen journalism promoting peace within cycles of violence.

 

 

Young Asia Television

http://www.yatv.net/

 

Young Asia Television, or YATV, is a pioneering multi media organisation where young people use the latest, as well as more traditional, communication methods to inform, educate and empower. Emphasis is placed on issues such as sustainable development, environmental protection, human rights and peaceful coexistence. The programmes are designed to encourage discussion and dialogue, and are therefore a catalyst for positive change. The style of the programmes educates while it entertains, is bold while being sensitive to young people and the societies from which they come from.

 

 

Independent Media Center

http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml

 

The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity. The Independent Media Center (www.indymedia.org), was established by various independent and alternative media organizations and activists in 1999 for the purpose of providing grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle. The center acted as a clearinghouse of information for journalists, and provided up-to-the-minute reports, photos, audio and video footage through its website. Using the collected footage, the Seattle Independent Media Center (seattle.indymedia.org) produced a series of five documentaries, uplinked every day to satellite and distributed throughout the United States to public access stations.

 

 

Voices of Reconciliation Radio (VOR Radio)

http://radio.voicesofpeace.lk

 

VOR Radio is part of the Voices of Reconciliation project conducted by the Centre for Policy Alternatives. VOR Radio features cutting-edge radio programming from a variety of civil society organisations and ongoing broadcast radio initiatives in Sri Lanka, national as well as provincial, with programmes focussing on the areas of democracy, governance, peace and reconciliation. By creating a single archive of civil society radio productions in Sri Lanka, VOR Radio aims to give greater visibility to digital media productions that can strengthen the peace process.

 

 

Knight Citizen News Network

http://www.kcnn.org/

 

The Knight Citizen News Network is a self-help portal that guides both ordinary citizens and traditional journalists in launching and responsibly operating community news and information sites. It seeks to help build capacity for citizens who want to start their own news ventures and to open the doors to citizen participation for traditional news organizations seeking to embrace user-generated content. Above all it seeks to impart an understanding of the qualities that make for responsible and credible journalism. The Network will offer numerous learning modules with guidance on how to populate citizen news sites with content, how to use databases and new technology to jumpstart reporting, and how to train citizen journalists.  It will provide a unique database of known citizen media sites, searchable by town and other criteria. It will also undertake and spotlight current research on citizen media trends.

 

 

Mumbai Voices

http://www.mumbaivoices.com/

 

On July 11th, 2006, the city of Mumbai bore witness to terrifying human tragedy. A series of seven explosions killed at least 200 people on crowded commuter trains and stations. All seven blasts came within an 11-minute span, between 6:24 and 6:35 p.m. In the hours and days following the blasts, ordinary Mumbaikars demonstrated remarkable ingenuity and resourcefulness in coping with the tragedy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh praised this grieving city for its strength. The next day, a majority of Mumbai’s citizens returned to work. Over the course of the day, the train stations were again packed with commuters.

 

Project mumbaiVOICES is a tribute to this resilience. It is an endeavor aimed at capturing the voices of the city’s survivors - so that the citizens of Mumbai can have their own say in the protection of their beloved city. The project offers ordinary citizens an opportunity to reflect on the disaster response in the aftermath of the blasts, examine the strengths and weakness, and collectively discuss desirable next steps to strengthen our response in the future. This project was piloted among 160 citizens of Mumbai – their testimonies are posted here.

 

 

Global Voices Online

 

http://www.globalvoicesonline.org

 

Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank focused on the Internet’s impact on society. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

 

 

Witness and The Hub

http://www.witness.org

 

WITNESS is an international human rights organization that provides training and support to local groups to use video in their human rights advocacy campaigns. Beyond providing video cameras and editing equipment, WITNESS is committed to facilitating exposure for our partners' issues on a global scale. We help broker relationships with international media outlets, government officials, policymakers, activists, and the general public so that once a video is made, it can be used as a tool to advocate for change.

 

The Hub is a participatory media site dedicated to human rights media. Anyone with a valid email address can be part of the community - you can upload footage, or simply watch what's on the site. You can create groups and mobilize action around human rights abuses. The Hub provides people with the tools and the platform to use their video footage, photographs or audio recordings to campaign against human rights abuses.

The Hub is a project of WITNESS – but it is designed for all individuals and groups working to protect and promote human rights.