CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM ar HAS WESTERN JOURNALISM BEEN LETTERS FROM DISCREDITED? TORA PRISON By JEREMY SCAHILL: IN SEARCH OF JUSTICE THE DASHING YASSER JUSTICE ON TRIAL ARE JOURNALISTS By IGE CHANGING WAH als Va eens enn ag) Se ae eed oes te eee ROR Pema teem ange ateen ea ag Citizen journalists are breaking through monopolised media and state controls to provide a window to the human consequences of conflict across the world. But with litt access to the resources afforded tovprofessionals, and working in an increasingly dangerous landscape, theycan sometimes become those consequences. So what are the ethics of using. them, how can we best utilise thei#material, and are we as an audience really ready for the unfiltered reality they present? ioTI ‘ . | N DRYAS \N _ \ EF WARNING: BCE ete Ce Ct ea ne aR ce One at NPA PPR Cee ene ert Rua io] ecoRMtmedcs roars cuia UeuKeCslakecsouls saute tele ne Tien ee eee icc Rema oneal emer CRUSE WE lost eeu NAR a ime tet aa kere called a “medieval siege”. Video by a local activist accompanied Colvin’s report. An infant boy lay on a hospital bed, his torso eerie enc neuer Rute aoa aon Prete auger teie seco eC Ce See Tea Mee @malachybrowne Oe Remon tom Rone MUR econ Cee oun eM Sar en Ra VAR ec ere neo eel Ra eco Cece Ve) eed eeu aes Rae aan I AU aC PONCE Re tna RM aN Ce ace aC mee WRC uem nec amare Reet eo RSC AN ane ia ues Rea arCa aTHE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM Syria is a war like no other. It is the most dangerous country for journalists to work in today. More than 60 have been killed and 80 kidnapped since 2011, yet never has a conflict been documented in such detail. Citizen Journalists (Cus) fill the void of professional reportage, often providing the only window to the human consequences of the conflict. Just as Colvin was a great war reporter, Rami al-Sayeed was a great citizen journalist: brave, pioneering, true to the facts. He drew the eyes of the world to Baba Amr, and indeed, his work drew Colvin and Conroy there. “We saw many of his videos [before going in],” Conroy wrote in an email. “We both knew the videos were being broadcast as unverifiable at the time, thus diluting their impact.” Though Colvin's report gave al-Sayeed’s work gravitas, Conroy's assertion is not entirely accurate. Storyful was founded in the knowledge that citizens around the world are now first-person reporters. Since 2010, our journalists have verified and alerted major international news organisations to content such as al- Sayeed’s. We have seen first-hand the value of citizen journalists, who broke through monopolised media and state controls to. become crucial sources of information from the Arab Spring and beyond. So far in 2014, diverse elements of the Ukrainian opposition have pushed their agenda to the international stage, and Venezuelans are bypassing state attempts at a media blackout as protests are quashed.re tara Cc PAULUS na. SRE TSE ees” alidaas PCW Journalism as a ‘sacred mission’ The special role played by citizen journalists in reporting from the Arab region was recognised by many professional journalists at the Arab Free Press Forum (AFPF) in Tunis in November 2013. “They were fully present on the revolution’s landscape [in Yemen],” said Khaled al-Hammadi, the head of the Freedom Foundation in Yemen. “Most of the confrontations were covered by them and not by established media. They talked about the dead, the wounded. Journalistic work for them was a sacred mission. They have become real actors in the political stage.”THE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM Two documentaries based on such work were nominated for the 2014 Academy Awards. Karama Has No Walls centres on the tipping point in Yemen's revolution, when pro-government gunmen killed dozens of anti-Saleh protesters on March 18, 2011, a date known as the Friday of Dignity. The idea for the documentary came from director Sara Ishaq’s discovery of YouTube videos of the attack amid “a systematic media blackout”. The film focusses on the work of two citizen journalists. The second nominated film, The Square, follows Egypt's uprising from the perspective of demonstrators in Tahrir Square, Cairo. An instructive moment in the film is the foundation of the media collective Mosireen. Dismayed by the bias of established media, activists and demonstrators led by British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla created an independent media outlet. The result is an authoritative video library charting successive revolutions and the polarisation of Egyptian society since the ousting of Hosni Mubarak. Scores of similar media outlets were born in response to the Arab Spring — Nawaat in Tunisia, media centres in Syria and Yemen, media groups in Algeria, Libya and Gaza, and beyond. These play a role in upholding core tenets of journalism — informing audiences and holding institutions of power to account.Documenting human rights abuses CJs working in repressive environments provide a value beyond news and documentaries: regularly, they document human rights abuses. The UN Commission of Inquiry into Syria, mandated by the Human Rights Council, has documented tens of thousands of YouTube videos posted by media activists and citizen journalists. At Storyful, we verify user-generated content (UGC) every week in collaboration with Witness.org for YouTube's Human Rights Channel. Storyful journalists worked to verify some 70 videos of torture, including ‘trophy’ videos filmed by perpetrators, which were broadcast in the Channel 4 documentary Syria's Torture Machine. This verification work involves establishing who, when, where and what: the UGC’s provenance, the location and date of filming, and importantly, ensuring that the events depicted are real.THE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM UGC of the 2013 Syria chemical weapons attack nearly changed the face of the conflict: The US Senate Intelligence Committee approved military intervention based in part on this evidence. (Notably, some videos used by the Committee were not original versions - a lapse in the verification process). UGC may play a part in future cases examining human rights abuses at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Videos were the key evidence in the conviction of Thomas Lubanga for enlisting and conscripting child soldiers to fight in the Ivory Coast in 2002 and 2003. The proliferation of UGC since that time offers the potential for future convictions at the ICC; however, several legal and logistical hurdles may first need to be overcome. Currently, prosecutors at the ICC must call as a witness any person who films UGC: the Lubanga case relied on the personal testimony of the cameramen involved and other witnesses. Relying on eyewitness testimony to support UGC imposes logistical and financial constraints. The ICC has the responsibility to protect witnesses; if providing security proves logistically impractical or too expensive, witnesses cannot be engaged and their testimony is lost. However, the law is evolving and it may soon be possible to admit UGC as evidence without an uploader’s testimony — provided the evidence can be independently verified. This would present the Court with greater scope to admit referrals, and would better serve the interests of justice.THE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM A disappearing archive In four years, Storyful has sourced and verified over 110,000 items of UGC that tell meaningful stories from around the world. Unfortunately, we lose part of this living archive every month. Facebook recently shut down dozens of pages operated by local media activists in Syria. Many of these provided valuable historical timelines and were used by Storyful and others in documenting the conflict since 2011. YouTube’s algorithms remove videos deemed to be shocking, disgusting or gratuitously graphic. Storyful has a direct relationship with the YouTube policy teams in Dublin and California, who restore videos very quickly. However, some 10,000 YouTube videos in Storyful’s archive have been deleted by the YouTube users themselves, or their accounts have been revoked. One major media outlet which Storyful has spoken to has lost 25 percent of its documented UGC archive from the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. We do not know if a cache of this content persists after it is deleted from the frontend of platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Terms and conditions of several social platforms disallow the downloading of content. In cases where there is a clear public interest, that should be exempted for organisations that treat content responsibly.THE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM Supporting an independent media Citizen journalists enrich the media landscape, but they work without access to the resources professional organisations have. Equipment, training, recourse to experience, journalism ethics and financial support are challenges they face. Recognising this symbiosis between established and new media places a responsibility on the former to ensure the essential work of Cs is supported and sustained. A potential model to financially support grassroots media creators would be a media exchange that allows contributors to license content to regional and international news organisations. A media co- operative, if you like. Storyful has built a successful model that generates revenue for creators of compelling content: something like this could be replicated. (Storyful has rules: it does not license or monetise explicit content, or violent and distressing content that directly depicts suffering.) However, media creators in over 30 countries are currently prevented from working with Western media due to embargoes, trade barriers and taxation restrictions. Broadcasters and publishers surveyed by Storyful expressed a greater interest in content from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over any other region. Many of the embargoed countries are in this region and ironically, many of these restrictions are intended to penalise the very repressive regimes that Cus often seek to expose. Lobbying for an exemption for media creators in these countries would help.Ss No story is worth a life An “absolutely atrocious” number of journalists have been killed in the last two years, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) wrote in its latest report, ‘Attacks on the Press’. It recorded “a near record” of 211 journalists imprisoned and 70 killed in 2013, including 29 in Syria where “there is no respect whatsoever for the work of the media,” according to CPJ executive director, Joel Simon. In 2013, two years after the ousting of President Ben Ali, were recorded in Tunisia. Thirteen journalists were kidnapped in Yemen in 2013, 12 attempted murders were recorded and one journalist was murdered. Other contributors to this edition outline similar instances elsewhere.THE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM The death of photographer Molhem Barakat in Syria in December 2013 cast a spotlight on the ethics of employing reporters in dangerous situations. Barakat provided pictures on a freelance basis to Reuters news agency. Although Reuters says it provided Barakat with a ballistic helmet and body armour, Czech photographer Stanislav Krupar, who worked in Aleppo with Barakat, told Storyful that he never saw him wear safety gear. Like other CJs, Barakat was a teenager. Nasr al-Namir and Khaled Rajeh, the videographers who inspired the Yemeni documentary Karama Has No Walls, were also teenagers. One was in school at the time, filming in his spare time. The documentary’s director, Sara Ishaq, wrote: “Meeting the cameramen and realising the degree of risk they took in order to document such violations of human rights was the biggest motivation for me to try my best to publicise their incredibly brave work.” WUMMM/=™|™/™/|™!™!7!’™!™!™!™!|!/™’!T/’!™!’!’™/™!™!™!’!™’!T™’™!’!’|!™M¢!M'’' “Meeting the cameramen and realising the degree of risk they took in order to document such violations of human rights was the biggest motivation for me to try my best to publicise their incredibly brave work.” Clearly, teenagers working as independent photographers have inadequate experience and are usually ill-equipped to cover a conflict. Arguably, violent street demonstrations are a step too far. Engaging them to do such work is a questionable labour practice at best. Barakat's photography provided for his impoverished parents. We don’t know if he had life assurance, or if his family has been compensated.Hostile environment training and combat first aid training - or evidence that this has been undertaken - should be required by any journalist or photographer being employed in dangerous situations. Sending safety equipment and safety packs should be a second requirement. But what of CJs who take risks to document stories that they feel are incredibly important, like those Sara Ishaq met, or Rami al-Sayeed? Al-Sayeed knew the risks: In his final online post he wrote: “I expect this will be my last message and no one will forgive you who talked but didn’t act.”THE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM News organisations cannot take responsibility for someone with whom they have no relationship. What we must not do is proactively solicit footage from a stranger in a dangerous situation. Nor must we accept specific offers that would place people in danger. Consent to use UGC must be sought in order to properly credit its owner, and to protect a source should she wish to conceal her identity: News organisations must not unduly put Cus at risk by revealing personal details in on-screen credits or via source details in printed copy. Additionally, news organisations should provide a safe means of communications, particularly with CUs who engage mainly online: encrypted email, encrypted instant message tools like SureSpot and other secure methods. At a more administrative level, legislative reform should be pressed for in countries where the media, human rights activists and others fall victim to political intrusions into basic freedoms. Robust laws trump weak judiciaries. This is no mean aspiration, particularly for the transitional democracies emerging from the Arab Spring, each facing its own political particularities. But some press freedom advocates have had modicums of success after much lobbying, such as in Palestine, where there is hope that progressive legislation will be passed by favourable ministries.THE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM Run it raw Of the YouTube videos she saw in Yemen, Sara Ishaq wrote: “I realised that merely sending the footage to TV channels would reduce the images to routine and forgettable news items, which would not impact viewers in the way that | was impacted having spoken to the cameramen and victims.” Ishaq has a point. Often, UGC is lost in the report, and distressing images are artificially sanitised. We suffer somewhat from a legacy where news stories arrived as text. The story was told in a reporter's words, with images that served to support that story. But today, the video is often the story. UGC transports us to that place, gives us a raw, unfiltered view of reality. It arouses emotions, drives home the reality experienced by those affected. Ifa story is a report on 20 people being killed in a bombing, is it gratuitous to run a video from the scene showing, for instance, the ragged remains of a dead child’s body? If these harrowing stories are told in a socially palatable way, are they at risk of losing that impact and realism? The lead video accompanying this article is intended to ask the question: Are we as an audience ready to face unfiltered reality? Al Jazeera's coverage of Operation Cast Lead in 2008 suggests we are. It had reporters inside Gaza during the 2008 offensive while international television networks were barred by Israel. Al Jazeera aired “far more graphic pictures than US networks of dead and injured Palestinian children and women”, USA Today wrote in an interview it ran with Al Jazeera's then managing editor, Tony Burman. The station's web video stream jumped 600 percent in worldwide viewership, USA Today wrote, and most hits came from the US. ecccceceeoeeee VvTHE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM We do not publish violent content gratuitously. Nor do we exclude distressing content if it is an essential part of the story. The essential questions we ask are: Does this content contribute to the story? Is there a news value, a human rights value or a criminal justice value? Is this content compelling as a standalone piece? If not, why are we using it? And any graphic or distressing content comes with at least one warning. Are we, as journalists, affected by what we see? We are not exposed to the post-traumatic stress war correspondents can experience, but occasionally, yes. However, we are generally desensitised to graphic content. Our job is to verify it, and often we focus on background detail. Indeed, advice we took from Bruce Shapiro of the DART Centre for Journalism and Trauma is that addiction, not trauma, poses the gravest psychological risk to professionals in this environment. Working with graphic content is a stimulant. Finding and working on material of such gravity, and the physiological reaction to seeing dramatic images all produces adrenaline. People can become addicted to it. Shapiro said that if we don't find a way of closing the door or calming down after work, it can be detrimental. However, he said, where issues arise it is usually due to a confluence of factors while encountering the material: personal circumstances, work stress and how you feel about the workplace. This broadly matches our experience. Separating citizen from journalist We have a massive factual resource in social media and the internet. A torrent of real-time information is available to us. The journalist's job now more than ever is to make sense of this, to verify the facts, to analyse and interpret them. ScccceceeoeeoeeeTHE CHANGING FACE OF JOURNALISM UGC offers a great insight into events as seen through the eyes of someone who may be involved, but it may tell only one side. The journalist's obligation is to put that often subjective perspective into context. Recent campaigns of civil disobedience by anti- government protesters in Thailand, for instance, were very effectively complemented by streams of social media content. As journalists we must report on this, but also be disciplined and curious enough to enquire beyond the colourful pictures: how representative are these participants of broader Thailand? What democratic alternatives exist or are being sought? Good journalism offers that objectivity without diminishing the essence of what citizen journalism has to offer. Just as we have a responsibility to the story, we have a responsibility to safeguard citizen journalists and independent journalists. Initiatives addressing this have begun. The deaths of photographers Tim Heatherington and Chris Hondros in Misrata, Libya in 2011 prompted the formation of a collaborative Facebook community where over 4,000 war correspondents, human rights activists and others share helpful information on a range of issues, including safety. The revelation that Heatherington’s life may have been saved had first aid been applied to stop arterial bleeding led journalist Sebastian Junger to found Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC). The Online News Association has established a new News Ethics Committee under which a working group is discussing the ethical challenges of social journalism. The conversation on how we standardise work with citizen journalists and independent journalists has already begun. It will benefit the industry and audiences to bring those standards to action. Malachy Browne is news editor with Storyful, the first news agency of the social media age. A coder turned journalist, Malachy takes an interest in the interface of technology with journalism: