Innovative blogging on the Iranian election

I am pleased to see that Aussie expat Craig Bellamy has put together an as it happens blog on the events in Iran in the aftermath of the disputed elections. I noted yesterday the minute by minute reportage coming from Andrew Sullivan's blog, and The Guardian has put together an excellent news blog on this.

In Australia, the bloggers themselves can be their own worst enemies. In a generally self-congratulatory discussion on Larvatus Prodeo about what a fool Christian Kerr from The Australian was, I put up this post:

Just to take the conversation out of the realms of the Canberra cognoscenti for a moment, I can agree with all of this about the likes of Christian Kerr and David Penberthy BUT…

At the moment I think what is happening in Iran is very interesting. It confirms that social media is not just apolitical fluff and chasing around Ashton Kutcher, but may have a political significance at certain moments. At the same time, I am quite glad that there are “journos as hard men of the streets” like John Simpson, who are employed by places like the BBC, and who have a very clear understanding of how to cover events like those currently happening in places like Teheran.

I’ve been following Andrew Sullivan’s blog, among other things, on this, and his observation on the MSM and the blogosphere and MSM-bashing is interesting in relation to these events:

Some of it is overblown. The NYT’s Lede blog has been outstanding, as I’ve said for the past several days. PBS and NPR are doing important work. Many MSM reporters are risking their lives to report this story from within Iran and we bloggers should honor their courage and work. Most of the photos I’ve published come from Getty and the remarkable Olivier Laban-Mattei. Cable news is useless, but we knew that already. But the future is a fusion of MSM tradition and new media open-source news gathering, aggregating, editing, filtering.

While some responses were well thought through, others were of the stock standard "You can't trust the mainstream media" stuff:

Terry yes, there are plenty of journalists still out there gathering primary data and reporting it, which is what I think we would all like journalists to do. However an increasing number of these ‘news’ stories consist of little more than summaries of what various anonymous people allegedly said, all written to support the journo’s evaluative opinion piece … one usually presented in the context of an argument full of assumptions about causation and implications for a particular interpretation of likely future developments.

Ken Lovell - well said. I also note that these unsourced reports are usually chockablock full of loaded epithets, of which my particular fave is ‘moderate’, closely followed by ‘reformist’. Both are usual in discussions of ‘hot spots’ in foreign correspondentdom and denote, if not actually paid agents of the CIA, at least willing Quislings.

As there is little point in being poster #60 responding to poster #40 responding to poster #25, I thought I'd reiterate a few points about what seems to be happening in Teheran:

1. The West is not behind these protests. Iranians are making their own judgements, and taking matters into their own hands. Barack Obama's foreign policy strategy in the region was premised upon the idea that he would still be dealing with Ahmadinejad after the election, who was the devil they knew. The U.S and others like Britain are basically playing catch up, and decidedly unsure on whether to support the uprising;
2. Blogging, You Tube, Twitter and other social media have been central to getting the messgae out to the wider world. The idea that this is all apolitical fluff that is about following Ashton Kulcher around and "are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism [but] are directives from the Central Software Committee" (to quote a recent pooh-poohing manifesto from the land of Digital Media High Theory) is actually being exposed in a sharp light on the streets of Teheran right now;
3. The mainstream media are not a monolith in relation to these matters. Several people have commented on the appalling lack of coverage on the U.S. cable networks, the BBC has been great, as has The Guardian and the New York Times news blog The Lede. Moral: don't write off media outlets that invest in serious coverage of international affairs. Bloggers are not filling this gap at this stage.
   

Trouble on the citizen journalism front

Readers of this blog would know that the emerging area of citizen journalism has been an ongoing interest of mine. The ARC Linkage grant that I have been involved in, with partners including SBS, On Line Opinion and Cisco Systems, developed the youdecide2007 site around the 2007 Australian Federal election. My colleagues Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders have also been reporting on citizen journalism initiatives on the Gatewatching site housed at ABC Online.

It is interesting to note this story about problems faced by CNN with its iReport user-generated news site, and its role in the spreading of false rumours of Steve Jobs' death that led to a sharp fall in Apple's share price on Friday October 3.

An iReport story posted by a "Johntw" at around 9 a.m. EDT with the headline "Steve Jobs rushed to ER following severe heart attack" entered the Internet rumor mill, landing on news site Digg.com and spawning dozens of nervous postings on micro-blogging site Twitter.com. By 9:25 am, the widely read online magazine Silicon Alley Insider had picked up the item.

Apple stock dropped with incredible speed on the strength of the rumor. The company's shares fell to $95.41 from $105.27 between 9:40 and 9:52 a.m. - 9 percent - before Apple denied the report. After describing the content as fraudulent, CNN confirmed Friday that a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation is under way in regard to the "citizen blogger" post, which caused a $9 billion loss in Apple shares before the post was debunked. The posting on iReport was "not vetted or reported by CNN journalists," according to a CNN statement.

The Jobs incident was the second time in a week that mainstream media organizations have been embarrassed by their online citizen journalism arms - sparking debate about the accuracy of reports from these Web sites and showing how it takes only a few minutes for a scurrilous rumor, placed on a site without sufficient editorial checks, to inflict damage.

Citizen journalism arises at the intersection of the new possibilities for participation from the Internet, the scope for citizen reporters to generate new stories and new angles on news, and the financial cries of traditional news media outlets that are leading to a lashing of costs in nws rooms throughout the world:

As interactivity and openness have become prized qualities in the new media landscape - and as traditional reporting jobs have been eliminated due to dwindling budgets - print, online and television news organizations have rushed to feature user-generated content. In addition to CBS and CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press have iPhone applications that allow users to submit images.

Over the past year, citizen journalists have been praised for breaking news and providing real-time documentation of major events. Blogger Mayhill Fowler, for instance, contributing to the political citizen journalism project Off the Bus, made headlines when she recorded an April speech by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in which he told a San Francisco audience that "bitter" small-town Americans "cling to guns or religion."

CNN started iReport in August 2006 as part of its online news operation, and initially every submission was vetted by a CNN producer before it appeared online or on television. The "game changer" moment, according to CNN spokeswoman Jennifer Martin, came in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007, when the network got cell phone video footage from a student who witnessed the shooting.

Traffic on iReport surged, and CNN decided to make iReport an independent site. CNN employs a moderation company but does not fact-check items - mostly, it is the job of iReport users themselves to weed out erroneous or inappropriate material. Only the submissions that go on the CNN Web site or cable channel are seen by CNN staff. Martin said no changes would be made to iReport because of the Jobs incident.

"It's an extremely important community to us," she said, noting that in September the site received 21,000 submissions.

As Jason Wilson and I noted in our recent paper on citizen journalism, the idea that it is a low-cost (or indeed no-cost) way of getting 'scoops' from the general public ignores the four types of work that are critical to new forms of networked journalism:

1. Content work
2. Networking
3. Community work
4. Tech-work