Twenty-five-year-old Ragae Hammidi of Casa Blanca, Morocco wears two hats. Five days a week, she attends a business school. But on weekends, she is a journalist who goes out on the street with a small camera, shooting videos of people and issues that go untold by professional media outlets.

“I report what is happening to girls and young women. It’s my story. If those responsible for reporting it do not, then I have a duty to tell it,” Hammidi says.

Hammidi shares an example. Morocco has a law allowing rapists to avoid charges if they marry their victims. In March 2012, a young woman who had been forced to marry her rapist committed suicide. It was local citizens who reported it while the professional media, fearing official reprisals, kept quiet.“I report what is happening to girls and young women. It’s my story. If those responsible for reporting it do not, then I have a duty to tell it.”

“Can you imagine a young girl first getting raped and then being forced to marry the same guy who hurt her? There are many such stories in our country that are not reported by the media. So it is up to us citizens to talk about it. We pick up our cameras and mobile phones and tell the story as we see it happening,” she says.

Hammidi spoke of her experiences at the 1st Global Forum on Media and Gender held here last week. Organised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the forum aims to increase participation of women in the media and also their access to new communication technologies.

Hammidi was trained by Global Girls in Media, a development media organisation that teaches high school girl students how to become citizen journalists and report on gender issues.

There are several thousand citizen journalists – most without any form of training – reporting today from Morocco and other Arab countries, including Sudan, Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and, most notably, Syria.

All these countries have one common feature: their traditional media is largely controlled by the government which is opposed to freedom of the press beyond a certain limit. This, coupled with easy access to Internet technology, has pushed citizens to take up reporting.

The content they generate – written reports, videos, audio messages and photographs – is fast becoming a primary source of information for an audience worldwide.

Fedwa Misk is the founder editor of Qandisha, a web-based magazine in Rabat, Morocco. Though a mainstream media outlet, she says only 20 percent of her writers are professionally trained journalists. The reason, she says, is that the magazine raises “disturbing and uncomfortable” issues such as rape, marital abuse, torture, along with regressive anti-women laws.

“Most of my writers are women who have experienced this first hand, so there is a lot of honesty in their writing. Readers love that. We have instances where they also respond quickly if there is a call to action,” she says.

Many citizen journalists are also driven by their passion for gender issues and are often ready to offer their content for free – another reason why many media outlets willingly accept them.

Bushra Al Ameen is the owner of Al Mahaba, a community radio station in Baghdad, Iraq, dedicated to women’s issues. She often uses content provided by citizen journalists, especially from areas that her own reporters cannot reach. “I run an 18-hour radio station. If citizen journalists are willing to give us stories, we take them,” she says.

But citizen journalists also often risk their lives, especially in regions that are politically volatile. According to research conducted by the Doha Centre for Media Freedom, since the beginning of the uprising in Syria in 2011 till November 2012, 72 reporters, including citizen journalists, have been killed.

“Detention, shooting, organised rape, torture – these journalists are subjected to various forms of violence every day. But it is difficult to count their exact numbers as many of them keep moving in and out of reporting,” says Abeer Saady, vice-president of the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate.

Saady, a professional journalist who has been physically tortured by Egyptian police, tries to identify, locate and train women citizen journalists in Arab countries. “It is very important for them to receive some safety training because if anything happens to them, there will be no compensation paid,” she says.

Peter Townson, lead writer at the Doha Centre for Media Freedom, thinks that alongside safety, citizen journalists also need training in how to report a story.

“In most cases, you cannot verify the sources. So basically you don’t know how much of what is reported is true and how much is exaggerated.”  The only way to deal with this is to identify and train the citizen journalists, he says.

Rachael Maddock-Hughes, director of Strategy and Partnerships at World Pulse, an action media organisation with 50,000 citizen journalists, agrees. World Pulse, based in Oregon in the U.S., trains women social activists in 190 countries in citizen journalism.

Says Maddock-Hughes, “We also channel their stories and solutions to leading mainstream media outlets.”

According to her, the programmes help women articulate their message better and allow them to be taken more seriously by a larger audience, especially on issues like gender violence.

Shekina, one of the citizen journalists trained by World Pulse, was the first woman to write against the practice of breast ironing in her West African country, Cameroon. She shot a video showing how older women were applying a hot iron to the chest of young teenage girls to stop their breasts from sprouting. The video drew condemnation and raised a global demand to end the practice.

Similarly, activists-turned-citizen journalists have written and helped launch worldwide campaigns against social practices like female genital mutilation and ostracism of girls during menstruation.

There would be much more such action and direct impact if more people at the grassroots accessed the Internet, says Meribeni Kikon, a citizen journalist in Kohima in the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland. She reports on gender inequality practised by the local churches and also violence against women such as date rape.

She says such issues cannot be reported from the districts as there is no Internet connectivity. “If only women here were able to access the Internet, they could not only report but also seek help in a crisis situation,” she says.

Eun Ju Kim, director of International Telecom Union (ITU), Asia-Pacific, also outlines the role of mobile technology in promoting gender equality.

“The world over, women and girls are behind men because they lack access to equitable opportunities in information technology. Access to broadband is critical for the empowerment of women,” says Kim, the first woman director of the ITU.

Tribal women from Chattisgarh in India record a message. Credit: Purushottam Thakur/IPS.

By Keya Acharya
RAIPUR, India, Nov 23 2013 (IPS)

Deep in the forests of central India live the Gond tribals, an almost forgotten lot, neglected as much by the state as by mainstream media. Many cannot read or write. But thanks to a new technology, and the rapid spread of mobile phones through India, they are now picking up their cell phone and making their voice heard.

A tele-news platform called CGNet Swara is helping change their world.

Ask Naresh Bunkar, a 38-year-old tribal in Chhattisgarh state who has used it time and again. “Computer mein chhappa jata hai” (“It gets typed on the computer”), he tells IPS proudly in Hindi, pointing out how CGNet Swara helps news spread through the Internet.

Through it, tribals air their grievances, share news and get administrative work done – all for free.

“I don’t need to pay one paisa for it,” says Bunkar, a field leader of sorts for tribals in the area.“It’s going to sound very strange for a computer nerd to tell you that technology is not the secret ingredient here.” - Bill Thies

It was through CGNet Swara that he first reported how a forest ranger had taken a bribe of 99,000 rupees (1,000 dollars) from 33 tribal families while promising them land deeds under India’s Forest Rights Act (2006). The news was circulated, and two months later he called again to say that the official had returned the money and apologised.

In another example of CGNet Swara’s influence, a teacher who had stolen school money, classroom furniture and food grains given by the government for tribal children was suspended after a report on his misdeeds was aired on the network.

Encouraged by such success stories, tribals have swiftly embraced CGNet Swara, which literally means ‘Chhattisgarh’s voice’ through the Internet. Started for the central Indian state, where 32.5 percent of the population is tribal, it is fast spreading to other parts of this vast country to reach out to areas that were beyond the pale of modern communication.

“While Indian states got divided on linguistic lines, the Gonds of central India were forgotten,” Shubhranshu Choudhary, a former BBC journalist, told IPS.

“They don’t have a newspaper in their native Gondi language, but the only new thing I have found on my return here is that most people now have cell phones,” he says.

Choudhary used that cell phone knowledge to set up CGNet Swara in 2010. The system operates in a region beset with Maoist insurgency. Its inhabitants often find themselves caught in the crossfire between the guerrillas and state forces.

A native of Chhattisgarh, he says the ferment in the region stems from years of neglect.

“We are trying to create another ‘development’ paradigm,” says Choudhary. “This communication system could well become the Google of the poor.”

Here’s how it works. When a tribal dials the number +91 80 500 68000, the message goes to a server in Bangalore. The caller disconnects and waits. Within seconds he receives a call and a recorded voice tells him to speak after the beep.

The server has been set up by Bill Thies, a self-confessed geek from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working at Microsoft’s Research Laboratory in India’s IT capital Bangalore.

Using a simple desktop and modem, Thies used a freely available software called Asterisk to build 10 lines that automatically call back ‘missed call’ numbers and then record a two-minute message from the caller.

“But,” says Thies, “it’s going to sound very strange for a computer nerd to tell you that technology is not the secret ingredient here.”

The ‘secret ingredient’ is the unique media networking system set up by Choudhary, whose community interests aligned with Thies in user-generated technology.

‘Swara’ now has 400 callers daily, dialling Thies’ server in Bangalore to either listen to or record their own news.

Each message goes to the moderator, Choudhary, and through him to about 50 strategically located volunteer sub-editors for cross-checking of facts and local follow-up.

The volunteers are educated Indians, well-versed in their spheres of work and residence, coming from a web-based Yahoo group called CGNet, set up in 2004 by Choudhary and journalist Frederick Noronha of Goa.

For instance, Bunkar’s message on the forest official’s bribe demand was first checked by CGNet’s locally based editorial volunteers for accuracy. It was then sent to the principal chief conservator of forests who found the allegation to be true and suspended the official.

The network – with the website – has even helped people access a popular rural job guarantee scheme.

The state government, however, seems reluctant to acknowledge its potential as a parallel system of governance.

“I personally find it an effective source of feedback and grievance redressal from the grassroots. I do make use of it off and on,” Chhatttisgarh Chief Secretary Sunil Kumar, the state’s top bureacrat,  told IPS, taking care to emphasise the non-official nature of the way he uses it.

Choudhary calls the network a kind of ‘citizen journalism’ wherein there is local news for local residents who are otherwise neglected by the mainstream media.

CGNet Swara now covers all of Chhattisgarh. It’s also popular in the nearby states of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. The news system has spread by word of mouth to the tribal belt across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Odisha, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh – an area Choudhary calls the ‘media dark zone’.

Ironically, the region’s ultra-left Maoist radicals, who claim to fight for the marginalised, have issued threats to Choudhary, asking him to close down CGNet Swara.

Choudhary, who divides his time between Delhi and Bhopal, says the Maoists are threatened by the concept of self-empowerment that the news system has brought to its users.

CGNet Swara is evolving into a radio system using a free medium-wave bandwidth, and Choudhary believes users will pay a small amount for subscribing. Running on a UN Democracy Fund and Knight Fellowship finances so far, the system is now looking for financial independence.

A health consultation network called Swasthya Swara is also being set up where traditional healers who make use of herbal medicines will be on air.

“We are extending our Swara system into a mobile-based voice portal,” says Choudhary. “There is no need for a newsroom now. Geography is now history.”

And, for the unempowered tribal population of India, whose numbers run into tens of millions, that’s indeed good news.

Jeff Adam works crop fields near Batavia, Iowa. Scientists say climate change could mean farmers like Adam will face new insects and plentiful weeds. Credit: Mary Chind/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

The news for environmental journalism in the United States is grim and getting grimmer.

On Mar. 1, the New York Times announced it was discontinuing the Green Blog that tracked environmental and energy news. In January, the paper had dismantled its three-year-old environment pod."Without journalists to uncover stories and speak to authoritative sources, the public loses." -- FERN's Samuel Fromartz

This year, too, Johns Hopkins University retired its 30-year-old science writing programme, following in the footsteps of Columbia University which, in 2009, closed its earth and environmental science journalism programme because of a poor job market.

Like climate change, the demise of science reporting is a slowly unfolding tragedy, say many environmental journalists in the United States.

At a time when conversations should be revolving around climate change, energy, natural resources and sustainable development, space for environmental reporting and coverage in the United States seems to be shrinking.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the fifth in a series, says the evidence is now overwhelming that humans are the primary drivers of global warming.

“A potential knowledge gap arises as environmental journalism shrinks. The public learns less about environmental and related health issues, but at the same time may fall prey to unscientific claims that often hold sway on the Internet,” a worried Samuel Fromartz, the editor-in-chief of the non-profit Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN), told IPS on the sidelines of the 23rd annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, held earlier this month in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

“Without journalists to uncover stories and speak to authoritative sources, the public loses,” he said.

Scott Dodd, editor of On Earth.org of the Natural Resources Defence Council, and who considers climate change the “most urgent story of our times”, told IPS that environmental issues are “consistently under-covered”.

From 85 weekly science sections in newspapers in the U.S in 1989, there were just 19 left by 2012.

“Environment is maybe 25 percent of a reporter’s beat,” Dodd said. “They are asked to cover city hall, night cops, the planning commission, and squeeze in an environmental story here and there when there’s time.”

In addition, climate change and the associated energy issues “tend to be complex, unspool over longer time periods, and require a level of knowledge and expertise that the average general assignment reporter might not have,” he added, noted that he is one himself.

“A long-term story like climate change, where the news today isn’t all that different from the news last week or last year, it’s difficult without a deep knowledge of the subject to find a fresh angle and sell an editor on why it should be front page news,” Dodd said.

Founded in 1990 by a small group of “full time” reporters and editors, the SEJ’s membership speaks volumes of this decline. Today, with a current strength of 1,300 members, a vast majority are “freelance journalists”, not all by choice, conceded Beth Parke, SEJ’s executive director.

But to be fair, if space for pure environmental journalism has shrunk, a bit of “cross-fertilisation” with other beats is still taking place.

“Editors generally understand that they cannot cover health, food, real estate, transportation, politics, energy, consumer issues… without bringing environmental questions into the story in one way or the other,” Parke said.

Interestingly, this meltdown of environmental reporting in the U.S., observed Adam Vaughan, editor of the U.K. based Guardian’s environment site, is not mirrored on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Guardian, for example, still has four reporters, two editors, two sub-editors and a picture editor dedicated to the subject, and earlier this year the paper hired an Australian environment correspondent for the first time. The Times, said Vaughan, recently moved one of its best reporters, Ben Webster, back to the environment beat.

So what did environmental journalism in the U.S. lose its glory to?

According to Parke, “Scandals, celebrities, sports – almost everything but serious investigative journalism is favoured as opposed to explanatory and public service journalism.”

The commercial media, she said, are “under severe pressure” to cover issues that increases their sales, ratings, listenerships and online views.

But all is not lost. This shuttering has led to a new genre – a rise in nonprofit journalism.

“I have seen the rise of more specialist sites online, such as InsideClimate, which won a Pulitzer recently, and Climate Central,” said Vaughan.

“There’s been the rising phenomenon of philanthropic-funded environmental efforts [such as Carbon Brief, China Dialogue, and Energy Desk], as well as freely-distributed public interest reporting from veteran journalists under the banner of the Climate News Network which were doing some of the best reporting on climate change,” he said.

“Look at what is winning prizes,” Parke said. “It’s news of oil spills, ocean health, contaminated food and building products, climate change. We see a lot of great work taking place outside the traditional media structure.”

And yet this kind of reporting has some obvious pitfalls.

“I’d view [blogs and magazines by NGOs] as an extension of their communications and marketing work, not what I’d recognise as traditional, independent journalism. It’s writing with an agenda, however impartial it appears to be,” said Vaughan.

Dodd, on the other hand, is worried “fewer people are seeing the important stories that these new outlets are telling” because these tend to be smaller, niche operations, without the resources or audience reach that national newspapers and the nightly network news were once able to command.

Cazú Barros participating in and reporting on a street protest in Rio de Janeiro, using a tablet. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 30 2013 (IPS)

The citizen journalists of Midia Ninja, who have covered the protests that broke out across Brazil in June right in the thick of things, are part of a new kind of reporting: one that is proud to be biased.

Just before the start of one of the latest protests, on Friday Sept. 20, “ninja” journalist
Cazú Barros said he was worried that he needed a spare battery for his cell-phone, because he had to provide hours of live stream coverage of a debate outside the Rio de Janeiro legislature.

His equipment contrasted sharply with that of reporters from large radio and TV stations – who were not there, however, because of the mainstream media’s lack of interest in this kind of news.

Barros has just a small camera on his 3G tablet, and uses an Android streaming app to provide live coverage.

“What strikes me the most about Midia Ninja is the way people search us out, because of our credibility,” he told IPS. “They don’t trust the traditional newscasts anymore, because they are tired of being manipulated.”

Ninja – an acronym for “independent narratives, journalism and action” in Portuguese – emerged two years ago in the southern Brazilian city of São Paulo as an initiative of the Fora do Eixo (off-axis) network of independent music collectives.

But it achieved unexpected visibility with the outbreak of the protests, which were triggered by bus and subway fare hikes but later expanded to target the political system, corruption and shortcomings in the health and educational systems. Many of the protesters are middle-class, and the demonstrations have come at a time of relative prosperity and declining poverty.

The Ninja protesters do not hesitate to follow and film a presumed police infiltrator or provocateur among the crowds of demonstrators.

Through their live streaming, the activists-cum-journalists secured the release of a demonstrator who was wrongly arrested on charges of throwing a Molotov cocktail, because their footage proved he was innocent.

Midia Ninja’s work has also helped curtail police brutality because their “eyes”, which are everywhere, have shown the police beating peaceful protesters.

“That was always our concern – providing a specific narrative of how we are feeling the streets as reporters,” said Felipe Peçanha, one of the founders of Midia Ninja, who was taken into custody for supposedly “inciting violence” but was released due to lack of evidence.

But Midia Ninja’s 200 volunteer citizen journalists covering events in Brazil’s main cities are not on their own. They have the support of their followers on the Twitter social network who, citing the @MidiaNINJA account, send out tweets, warning for example when riot police are approaching a certain spot.

At the peak of the protests, in June and July, Midia Ninja’s broadcasts reached some 180,000 people. The group’s Facebook page now has over 212,000 “likes”.

“This is a form of media that has more freedom to tackle issues in a more integral manner,” one of the group’s followers, a student named Thiago Cavalcante, told IPS. “It doesn’t show just one side, as absolute truth, but presents all of the facts, and it lets the viewers put together their own reality, based on the images.”

Demonstrators have also expressed discontent with the mainstream media, especially TV.

Some have thrown stones at the offices of Rede Globo, Brazil’s main TV station which is one of the biggest in Latin America, and have booed its journalists. In addition, broadcast vehicles of two other stations, SBT and Rede Record, were set on fire.

“The bias of the press has been challenged, because through the protests, Brazilian society has seen the media consortiums’ game of interests more clearly,” Peçanha said.

“This became visible through the alternative coverage, but the protesters also saw it for themselves,” he added.

“After coming back from a protest, many would turn the TV sets on in their homes and see a very different story than the one they had witnessed themselves. And they started to understand that ‘something is wrong here’.”

Midia Ninja and others involved in this fast-growing form of reporting see journalistic neutrality as a big lie.

Peçanha makes no secret of the fact that his aim is to accompany the social movements, which historically have not had a voice in most of the mainstream media.

He argues, however, that the big media outlets are not “impartial” either, but answer to their own interests or those of the economic powers they represent – although less transparently, he says, than the new citizen journalists.

“Our work highlights the bias of the press, which should be increasingly evident, so people can have more honest contact with the news,” he added.

Surveys carried out by the Oops website found that the ratings of various news programmes dropped between Aug. 31, 2012 and Aug. 31, 2013. Audience share fell 41 percent in the case of Rede TVNews; 12 percent in the case of Globo’s Jornal Nacional and Bandeirantes’ Jornal da Band; 18 percent in the case of Bandeirantes’ Brasil Urgente; and six percent in the case of Jornal do SBT.

Analysts attribute this loss in ratings by Brazil’s main newscasts to the explosion in Internet use and the number of online news sources, along with the drop in credibility of mainstream news coverage.

“They are losing credibility and ratings, and as a result advertising, even during primetime news programmes,” media analyst Rachel Boechat, a Midia Ninja collaborator, told IPS. “That means the impact of public opinion is important, because the Internet user is also an opinion-maker.”

Boechat said citizen journalism makes “a crucial contribution to the democratisation of information and breaks with the homogeneous discourse of the media in Brazil, which have become highly concentrated bodies representing political, party and economic interests,” she said.

Vinicius Braz, the adviser on social networks at the Brazilian chapter of Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation, said this kind of journalism forms part of other evolving changes. “That old world, defined by a state and a system of communications, is breaking up little by little,” he remarked to IPS.

In that respect, he said, what stands out about Midia Ninja is having brought to light a larger phenomenon: “People are realising that they can produce their own reports and share them in real time, and that they don’t have to be a journalist to do so.”