MEDIA MATTERS
The tsunami blog
SEVANTI NINAN
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Technology sharpens a citizen's ability to respond, and the year gone by saw further evolution of the concept of grassroots media such as weblogs.
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PTI
Devastated Cuddalore -- within hours of the tsunami striking, there were "how to help" links on different blogs.
WHEN you learn that a disaster has struck, waiting for the next day's newspaper has become a distant third in your list of options. The first move now would be to tap a TV news channel, the second would be to get on to the Internet. On the Net there are now two generic options. You could tap a news site such as the BBC or a blog for a less impersonal response. Bloggers take their role as citizen media very seriously. Within a couple of hours of the tsunami striking, you had "how to help" links going up on all kinds of blogs, with frequent updates being posted. (Technology sharpens a citizen's ability to respond — SMSes also started going out giving addresses in the neighbourhood where you could contribute relief materials.)
Blogs are now syndicated
The year gone by saw further evolution of the concept of grassroots media such as weblogs. You take a medium used by the cyber-garrulous to enshrine personal angst and turn it into something socially useful. Blogs are now syndicated, and the widely accessed ones are patronised by advertisers. August 2004 saw the publication of a book that said it was describing the future of journalism, or tomorrow's journalism. Titled We the Media it described a relatively new phenomenon in several ways. As the emergence of non-standard news sources, as the growth of grassroots journalists, as journalism that is even more instant than a TV news channel. As the first draft of history being written by a former audience.
9/11 the turning point
Dan Gillmor, the author, is a technology writer who has a blog called Siliconvalley.com. He has followed the evolution of blogging and mailing lists and looks at September 11 as the event which marked the arrival of personal journalism, of people who would be traditionally described as readers/viewers/listeners getting on to the Internet to report on what was happening at that point in New York City to families and survivors.
Gillmor says his book is about journalism's transformation from a 20th Century mass-media structure to something profoundly more grassroots and democratic. "It's a story, first, of evolutionary change." What is making the change possible is technology which allows anyone to become a journalist at little cost and, in theory, with global reach. It's there on the Net, you go to a blogging site and learn how to set up your own weblog, which is a personal diary. You also learn how to post on it. And then, if you have the imagination and gumption, you can stop just being at the receiving end of news. The phrase Gillmor loves to use is turning journalism from being a lecture into a conversation. By doing so, grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, and taking us to a theatre of action where there is no media. The Baghdad Blogger, and all those families in Kosovo who sent out e-mails during that covered-from-outside war demonstrated how valuable such a source can be.
(Grassroots Internet technology also has political potential. Howard Dean, United States presidential candidate who did not get elected, did however create electoral history by running a campaign with the Internet as its chief engine. He used it to raise more money than any other Democratic candidate, to organise thousands of volunteers to go door-to-door, to write personal letters to likely voters, host meetings, and distribute flyers. All by using Meetup, a webtool for forming social groups.)
TV and the SMS
What TV channels are doing with SMS technology reflects this move to pull in the audience as someone whose views also make news. But the true value of blogs to my mind lies not in views but in generating ground level news. A newspaper or TV reporting team is limited by size, by the backgrounds of the people who make up the team, by their experience and knowledge, and circumscribed by the limited geographic area they can cover. When you turn citizens into reporters and have the ability to cross check and edit what they put out, the result can enrich the relevance of the news product to people's lives.
Right now the most evolved example of this kind of journalism comes from South Korea where www.ohmynews.com is demonstrating how a news operation can incorporate citizen reporters. They started OhmyNews with 727 citizen reporters, and now have about 35,000. They are paid small money but the site enables appreciative readers to contribute, so writers of stories that move or inspire find themselves a little richer.
Its founder Oh Yeon Ho explains why the small money does not matter: "We give them something that money cannot. We make OhmyNews a public square and a playground for the citizen reporter and readers. The traditional paper says `I produce, you read' but we say `we produce and we read and we change the world together'." The site does act as a gatekeeper for the news generated by citizenry. "South Korea is small enough that our staff reporters can reach the news scene in a few hours to check whether a citizen reporter's article is correct or not."
Ideal for India
The idea seems tailor made for parts of India where conventional journalists do not manage to reach. Regional language newspapers in both the South and in the Hindi belt transcend this difficulty by using stringers, who are after all grassroots journalists. There are thousands of them operating in villages and semi-urban areas, filing news items on civic problems and crime. The problem is that they seldom report on injustice.
A few years before he disappeared in Assam, the development worker Sanjoy Ghose tried to make the idea of grassroots journalism work here. He founded an organisation called Charkha which was trying to get rural activists to send news from their areas of operation. But the conventional outlets he turned to, to see if they would take such news, had many misgivings.
At today's juncture when Big Media is powerful, often exploitative of news, and relatively immune to criticism, what would have immense subversive value is if blogs were to be published by people from within media. Imagine an anonymous web diary describing the process of decision making in a news channel. Telling us which news items get used, discarded, played up, played down or tweaked. Think of the impact that would have.
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