Iran election: faces of the dead and detained | World news | guardian.co.uk via kwout

They’re at it again. Following the very domestic issue of MPs’ expenses, The Guardian’s latest experiment with crowdsourcing goes international: Iran.

“We want to put a face to each of those hundreds – possibly thousands – killed or arrested since the Iranian election.

“Where we have a picture we have used it. However, our information is incomplete. If you have a picture of any one of these individuals or information we do not have please click below.”

Simple.

(Oh, and there’s also a spreadsheet of data and the invitation to post visualisations to the Datastore’s Flickr group.)

Coincidentally, a very similar project was mentioned by Arianna Huffinton at yesterday’s Activate Summit organised by… The Guardian.

NPR: Turning The Camera Around: Health Care Stakeholders is basically an image of healthcare lobbyists with rollovers that tell you who they are and how much they have spent. The explanatory paragraph ends:

“We’ve begun to identify some of the faces in the hearing room, and we want to keep the process going. Know someone in these photos? Let us know who that someone is — e-mail dollarpolitics@npr.org or let us know via Twitter@DollarPolitics.”

The piece, Huffington explained, went viral, which is pretty key for most crowdsourcing projects (and, by the way, for engagement, democracy… you know: the small things).

Meanwhile, the New York Times is also doing a little crowdsourcing on Iran:

“The New York Times would like readers in Iran to help us document the post-election unrest in Iran. Please upload your photographs using the form below, letting us know when and where the photographs were taken and whether you wish to remain anonymous.”

Or is it just citizen journalism? I guess it depends what they do with the material – it could be a lot clearer. 

More? Here are the webpages I’ve tagged ‘crowdsourcing’ on Delicious

I follow the BBC World, the Guardian and the New York Times through my Twitter account, among other news services, but I get more news and information from the friends I follow on the microblogging service. My friends just happen to read stories from a wide variety of sources and pass along the kind of information they are interested in, and that by extension, I am interested in. In other words, they act as my personal filters for news. And I can safely say that I return the favor for several of my friends as well.

This concept is not exclusive to the new media world. Since the 1940s, media scholars such as Paul Lazarsfeld have spoken about the two-step flow of communication where “opinion leaders” play a huge part in transmitting information from the media to its audience. These mediators help the process by disseminating news in a more concise,  intelligible way, but also often infuse their personal agendas and perspectives. Opinion leaders have always existed; who they might be and how you obtain your information from them has changed over time.

At one time they were friends and family who discussed news at the dinner table, later they became radio hosts and television pundits, even late-night comedians. In today’s Web 2.0 world, they include anyone from a Facebook friend to your favorite bloggers and tweeters. Trusted bloggers who write posts multiple times a day often become go-to sources of information (sources), and the most active tweeters may be the microblog’s most influential opinion leaders. This is merely reinforced by the recent Harvard study, which concluded that the upper 10% of tweeters produced a third of Twitter content.

Fine, so it’s great for information getters. But what’s in it for the information gatherers? Almost every journalist now seems to have a Twitter account with an ever-exploding number of followers. Other than the obvious reasons of getting the word out about their latest news stories, journalists also gain information
from the Twittersphere, in the form of sources, story ideas and well, straight news. Little wonder then that the young social media tool is being used in a variety of ways to do better journalism — from gathering a group of experts on a topic to reporting breaking news events. And in an age where everyone from politicians to CEOs is busy tweeting, the service brings newsmakers closer to readers and journalists, thus cutting out cagey PR professionals.

A journalist cannot and does not know everything, and chances are, he’ll know more about what’s in the news, but less about the most popular topic being discussed by regular people in the real world. Enter Twitter.

Almost a decade ago, Dan Gillmor said this about reporting on technology while inhabiting a Silicon Valley overflowing with techies:

“In most gatherings, I’m taking up the far-left data point on the intelligence bell curve. Of course, being the least knowledgeable person in the room has its advantages; I always learn something.

That’s one reason why my blog has been so helpful. It’s sparked deeper conversations with my sources and my readers, who are always telling me things I don’t know. This is interactive journalism.”

If the computer professionals at Silicon Valley helped Gillmor with esoteric information about the world of technology, imagine just how much more information he could get out of 14o-character tweets from his computer-savvy readers.

And that simplicity is in itself the benefit of Twitter. It takes a lot of effort to sit down and write a blog post on a subject, or even a response to a thought-provoking post. But a 140-character message expressing an occurrence, and one’s thoughts on the occurrence with the utmost brevity can aid journalists to explore and write about it. Not surprisingly, Gillmor sees various benefits in Twitter, be it following the latest trends among readers or getting more information from those who have it.

It isn’t always informative. “….not all tweets are equally useful,” writes Paul Farhi in the American Journalism Review this month while exploring Twitter as a journalism tool. “Tweets from reporters covering the heavily choreographed political conventions last summer produced plenty of snark and trivia, but little in the way of important or interesting news.”

But the good news is that all tweets don’t have to be useful. The trivia and the snarks are what bring your audience in, and then you surreptitiously slip in a story about the Darfur crisis. I’m half joking, of course, but much like the blogosphere before it, the Twittersphere gains from these personal angles and intimate updates.

For instance, The Washington Post uses Twitter to update you on every significant story it ever publishes, but Chris Cillizza posts specific tweets that have to do with politics, media, and technology (and throws in one about his newly-painted door for good measure). And then there are funny ones: “Tourists in Washington do a lot of running for some reason. What’s the hurry?”

Personal tweets are akin to the personal angles in stories or blogs – ones that bring the journalist closer to the individual. Josh Marshall, perhaps the best-known journalist-turned-blogger in the US, posts pictures of his son on TPM Muckraker. That doesn’t take away from his site’s breaking of the story about the firing of eight US attorneys in early 2007. But his audience knows more about him.

Hence the term “social” media, hello! It’s the way new media works, that’s why blog posts can sometimes be more popular than straight news stories, and why tweets can bring more breaking news in real time to more people.

It’s still serious business. From reporting the discovery of water ice on Mars, to transmitting life-saving information during terror attacks to covering courtroom trials, Twitter has come a long way.

When it takes a US President to request a company to put off scheduled maintenance so an anti-government protest in a country worlds away can go on, you know it’s serious business.

Talking of which, of course, there are pitfalls. The blog and Twitter following of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Iran’s presidential challenger (who, to the Western world is clearly an improvement over Ahmedinejad) grew within hours of the citizen uprising. As Middle East experts know and later reported, Mousavi isn’t exactly the ideal leader, considering his past actions as a former prime minister. It took days for the mainstream media to start addressing that fact – and by that time, the Twitter world was already “green,” expressing support for Moussavi, a following promoted by no less than the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan.

The mistakes and errors in judgment made by a newspaper can be retracted, those made by a news Web site or a blog can be partially retracted, given the fact that they have perhaps already traveled horizontally through the Web via hyperlinks; when they happen on the Twittersphere, a medium that conveys information through 140 characters, the cat is that much harder to put back in the bag, as Washington Post reporter Ron Charles recently found.

Errors are amplified in this media environment because most Twitter followers and bloggers aren’t so much validating and confirming their facts as they are reinforcing an opinion or statement they already agree with. But while the social media sphere is a business of corroboration for regular people, it should not remain so for journalists.

The advantage of Twitter is that it is the simplest source for breaking news stories. The disadvantage of Twitter is that it is the simplest source for breaking news stories. Getting back to the Iran coverage, while mainstream news organizations were waiting for their international correspondents to get back with deep, in-depth analysis, Twitter was already overflowing with content, some of it not necessarily erroneous, but certainly wanting in context and depth, and very decidedly green.

As Steven Johnson aptly summarizes in Time:

“Increasingly, the stories that come across our radar — news about a plane crash, a feisty Op-Ed, a gossip item — will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow. Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network. This will lead to more news diversity and polarization at the same time: your networked front page will be more eclectic than any traditional-newspaper front page, but political partisans looking to enhance their own private echo chamber will be able to tune out opposing viewpoints more easily.”

From the Baghdad Blogger to Twittering the Chinese Earthquake, plenty has been written about the potential of blogs to allow Western readers access to foreign voices: the ‘Parachute Journalism’ of ‘Our Man in Tehran’ is appearing increasingly anachronistic and paternalistic next to the experiences and thoughts of those caught in the crossfire.

Despite this, mainstream media portrayals of countries like Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China remains largely superficial.

This is the problem that Antony Loewenstein seeks to address with The Blogging Revolution (Amazon US) – a book which is as much about bloggers as it is a demonstration of what blogging has made possible.

Through contacts made in the blogosphere, Antony visits each of the six countries named above in turn, speaking to local bloggers, ex pat bloggers, and experts, in an attempt to reveal a richer, more detailed picture of living under one party rule.

In this he is largely successful, and in the Afterword you get a key insight into why:

“I never viewed my interview subjects as merely a journalistic project; rather, they represented an opportunity to develop ongoing relationships with people who could continually broaden my knowledge of the Middle East, China and Cuba.”

Rarely is the difference between career journalism and blogging so well illustrated.

The reader is introduced to  bloggers across the political spectrum (although not the most powerful blogger of them all, Iranian President Ahmadinejad), and in doing so, illustrates how reality doesn’t quite fit into the pro- or anti-American boxes the Western media so often talk of.

Time and time again Loewenstein encounters people who like many aspects of America (one sees it as having many “Islamic” qualities), but would rather shape their own political future and structure, thank you very much.

It is fascinating to learn the degree to which blogging has been adopted and indeed co-opted in many of the countries: Iran has around a million bloggers, with 10% regularly updated; and Farsi is listed by Technorati as among the top five languages on the internet; one in 30 Chinese people writes a blog.

There is a Muslim Bloggers Association and an Office for Religious Blogs Development, as the government helps every religious student to start a blog.

In Egypt bloggers succeeded in forcing the state to the “extremely unusual” move of putting a police captain on trial for torture. They set up email lists for journalists and human rights workers during the state violence of 2006.

Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas was the first blogger in 2007 to be awarded the Knight International Award for Excellent in Journalism.

But for their efforts bloggers have been detained for months without trial, convicted and jailed. The Arab Bloggers’ Union has campaigned for the release of Ahmed Mohsen in particular.

In Syria, where Islamist bloggers are not as ubiquitous “for the simple reason that the government views them as a threat to its rule”, Tariq Baiasi was “abducted” for posting a comment on a website criticising the state’s security apparatus. He disappeared in July 2007, and was recently sentenced to three years in prison.

In Saudi Arabia the SaudiJeans blogger says that the state rarely imprisons bloggers or tortured journalists, preferring instead to simply ban them. Almost half of bloggers here are women, but Loewenstein is unable to meet with any due to the almost segregated society.

In Cuba he comes up against a lack of bloggers – not surprisingly: only 2% of the population have web access due to a combination of the US embargo, poverty, and state restrictions:

“Of over 3000 journalists who work openly for the government … only 150 regularly used the web … Some sites were inaccessible and an internal intranet was widely used.”

(Recently there have been signs that this is changing)

Because it was illegal for blogger Yoani Sanchez – who was awarded the Ortega and Gasset prize in Journalism by El Pais – to use internet access at Western hotels, and the hourly fee is prohibitively expensive, she “has to write fast and avoid being caught. Some island bloggers are forced to dress as tourists, feign accents and covertly enter hotels to get online.”

Then there is China, the world’s biggest jailer of journalists. According to a study by Middlebury College, blogs in China are far more likely to carry criticism than Chinese newspapers, with successes including exposing the assault of street sellers by local police (a story local TV journalists had refused to cover).

Censorship is well covered throughout the book – key here are Western companies including Cisco, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! But readers find ways around the censorship, ‘reading in code’: if a blogger in China talks about ‘river crab’, for instance, they’re talking about censorship.

This is a worthy, complicated book that reveals a richer understanding of other lives in other countries. The hope expressed here is that the voices now being heard on the blogosphere will help spread that understanding across borders. The question, as Loewenstein asks of journalists, is “Are we listening?”

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