Syria, citizen journalism and the capital T truth

As we’ve described a number of times at GigaOM, journalism has become something that virtually anyone can practice now, thanks to social tools and digital media, and this democratization of distribution has had a profound effect on the coverage of uprisings in Egypt and Libya, and more recently in Syria. Thanks to YouTube and Twitter and other networks, more information is available about what is happening in those countries — but is it reliable? According to some reports, the news coming from Syria has been altered by activists who are trying to make a specific point. Does that mean citizen journalism is flawed? Not really. It just means that we need better tools to make sense of the flood of news that is all around us.

As Britain’s Channel 4 described in a recent piece about the rise of citizen journalism in Syria, dozens of video-bloggers have emerged who are literally risking their lives to bring video evidence of the violence there to the world — in at least one case, a video-blogger died while live-streaming a demonstration. While the death of veteran Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin in February got a lot of attention, so far not much has been paid to the “citizen journalists” who are putting themselves in similar situations. In a piece on Colvin’s death, New York Times media writer David Carr said that foreign reporting requires more than just “clicking on a YouTube video.”

Citizen journalism often comes with a viewpoint

Carr is right, at least in the sense that what is missing when we try to understand a place like Syria or Egypt through YouTube videos or Twitter is context. How do we know the videos or reports we are getting are true? Channel 4 said Tuesday that it has discovered at least one video of the city of Homs was altered by the person who uploaded it, with a cloud of smoke added to the picture.

The video journalist who took the video admitted that he altered it, and said he did so to raise awareness of the violence taking place in the city so that the world would respond. This sounds a lot like the arguments that some observers made in defence of Mike Daisey, whose report on Public Radio International about visiting Apple factories in China turned out to be partially fiction. Some — including Daisey — said that his embellishments were justified because they exposed a larger truth about Apple and its conduct in China, while others said any altering of facts made the entire story suspect.

One of the issues in a place like Syria or Egypt is that much of the reporting we get from non-mainstream sources almost inevitably comes from people who are either involved with a rebel group or are friendly towards it (although it should be noted that this is the case with much traditional foreign reporting as well). This phenomenon was also seen during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, when video reporters like Tim Pool emerged to tell the story of the protests, and developed a large following very quickly — despite making it clear that they didn’t see themselves as journalists.

Traditional and citizen journalism are not adversaries

One response to this phenomenon is to lament the loss of traditional foreign reporting, as David Carr seemed to be doing in his tribute to Colvin, and criticize the emptiness or unreliability of YouTube videos and “citizen journalism.” But another response is to see the value of the phenomenon — as Nick Kristof of the NYT seemed to in comments he made about citizen journalism and the Occupy movement — and try and apply journalistic principles to this maelstrom of content coming from a thousand different sources, some reliable and some not. This is what the BBC does with its “user-generated content” desk, which sits in the newsroom and filters and verifies reports coming from Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.

This is also what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has been doing with his Twitter account ever since the “Arab Spring” revolutions broke out in Tunisia and Egypt. As he described in a recent interview with Current.org, Carvin sees Twitter as the place where he does the majority of his journalism — and where his followers act simultaneously as sources, fact-checkers, editors and distributors:

It’s not that I’m just using Twitter and integrating other forms of journalism — it’s that I see Twitter as the newsroom where I spend my time.

Whenever I write about what Carvin is doing, someone inevitably makes the argument that what he is doing isn’t “real” journalism — which presumably consists of flying to these locations and reporting on camera the way we are used to. The argument seems to be that since Carvin is sitting at his desk monitoring Twitter (and using the telephone), that he isn’t really doing journalism. As I’ve argued before, this is absurd. Carvin is applying exactly the same journalistic principles that traditional reporters always have, including the duty to verify facts — he is simply applying them in real time and in full public view, which is arguably better than the traditional alternative.

Citizen journalism and the rise of social media doesn’t mean that we don’t need traditional foreign correspondents any more, or traditional reporting — if anything, we need those kinds of skills even more than we ever have. But the globe-trotting war correspondent is no longer the only game in town when taxi drivers can report bombings just as easily as a CNN crew, and training the new breed of curator journalists may involve Twitter and YouTube lessons instead of flak jackets. In the end, as Jay Rosen has said many times, journalism gets better when there are more people doing it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Petteri Sulonen and Yan Arief Purwanto

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