New GFMD Insider Out Now
31.01.12
Dear GFMD Members,
Last year was an exciting year. The Global Forum for Media Development and its members promoted recognition of media development as an integral part of development policies in many international forums and helped increase support for media development.
We coordinated the response of the media development sector to the debate on aid generated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. You can read more about it in this issue’s Funder’s Perspective and in James Deane’s column.
We put media development on the agenda of the European Union. An article in this issue gives you the highlights of a debate GFMD organized at the European Development Days in December in Warsaw.
GFMD helped identify strategies for using new media to promote free expression and development in Asia at the Bali Media Forum in December. An article by Bettina Peters and Subendran Ravindran gives some useful examples of ongoing new media projects in that region.
This year promises to be our most exciting year since the launch of GFMD as a membership network some three years ago. We will hold our third GFMD World Conference in Brasilia, Brazil, September 25-28, expected to bring together some 500 media development practitioners from around the world. The main question we will address at the conference is how new digital technologies and social media are changing the environment we work in and how the current information revolution impacts media development. The use of mobile technologies, increase of the Internet information space, social media, and other pressures on traditional media and market models are all changing the way media development is being implemented. Together, we want to define new strategies for media development that serve the information and communication needs of the public.
Amy Webb’s column in this issue is linked to the conference theme of looking at technology trends in 2012.
In the next two months, all GFMD members will receive a call for proposals for sessions they want to organize. We want to give as many of our members as possible the chance to present their successes and things that could have worked better. The conference will be very interactive, and there will be about 40 different panels, workshops and networking sessions. So, watch this space.
Aidan White’s column brings good news about a new initiative, the Global Editors Network, a group of news executives working together to promote ethical conduct and credible, high quality journalism.
Susan Phliliber provides advice to media development groups involved in journalism training, describing how curricula should be defined to allow for effective evaluation.
We hope you will enjoy this issue of the GFMD Insider. Please send any comments or suggestions to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Bettina Peters
GFMD Director
A Funder’s Perspective | Media Critical to Accountability on Aid
New Media: Tools to Promote Democratic Debate in Asia
New Media is Powerful. But What About Accountability, and Access?
Cool New Tools | Twitter for Newsrooms (#TfN)
Forward Thinker | James Deane on the Price of Consensus
Eye on Results | Susan Philliber on the Value of Curricula
Tech Corner | Amy Webb on 2012
Tomorrow’s Journalism | Aidan White on Rising Above Murdoch
By Bettina Peters, GFMD Director
Throughout 2011 the work of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) focused on the question on how to make development aid more effective and how to ensure that citizens in developing countries can scrutinise their government’s national development policies. Efforts culminated in the 4th High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea on November 29-December 1, 2011 where OECD member states agreed a final statement, the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation by the member states of the OECD.
As James Deane explains in his column in this issue, discussions at Busan focused on the failures of governments to live up to the commitments on aid and aid effectiveness they had made in previous OECD Forums. The role of independent and pluralistic media in giving citizens the possibility to hold their governments to account did not figure highly on the Busan agenda and media did not get a mention in the final document.
But not all is lost for supports of media development. The OECD itself recognised the importance of media in supporting development when it organised its first international seminar on media assistance and accountability in June last year. One of the conclusions of that event was that spending on media development appears to be increasing across the democratic governance community, and media’s importance in shaping democratic governance outcomes is increasingly acknowledged by donors.
The GFMD, which had lobbied for the inclusion of media in the Busan document, has been in touch with donors to find out whether they think that media is less important for development today. Most of the donors we contacted felt that, if anything, the events around the Arab Spring have shown that media and information technologies have gained importance in bringing about social change and development. 
As Troy Etulain, Senior Adivsor for Independent Media Development at USAID points out:
“The media enable citizens to hold their government to account and provide information critical for all forms of development. Modern technology also enables individual citizens to report on and share essential information amongst themselves. We should deepen our commitment to strengthening the role of the media in ensuring greater debate, civic, participation, national ownership of development processes, improving transparency and combating corruption, including by supporting capacity development.”
Stephen King, the head for government transparency at the Omidyar Network said:
“Omidyar Network believes a healthy government — one that is responsive to its citizens — requires a healthy, robust fourth estate. By focusing additional efforts on fostering investigative and citizen journalism, we believe we will be catalyzing transparency efforts that will positively affect millions of people.”
Mark Nelson from the World Bank Institute highlights the need of the media development community to make more efforts to persuade governments in developing countries that media has an important role to play in promoting economic and human development:
“The Busan meeting was encouraging in some ways in terms of the high profile that transparency and important role that it placed on broad, inclusive country ownership and leadership. But it is also a major issue for the media development community that the importance of media is not explicitly recognized, particularly given the global lack of progress on press freedoms and media sustainability. The media development community needs to work much harder to build stronger political support, particularly in developing countries, for a rigorous, independent media sector. Now that the focus of development work is moving to the country level, with developing countries more in the drivers’ seat, it is particularly important to develop local leaders and champions. The problem for media development in Busan was that no one from the South spoke up for media development. It was only a few northern voices who pushed this point, and this is no longer enough.”
Supporters of media development in the donor community feel that media should have been mentioned in the Busan declaration. Independent media uniquely provide the credible public information platforms required by an informed citizenry and their elected officials for democratic development processes, as well as the external scrutiny needed to ensure that public resources are used transparently and effectively. Support for independent media must be an integral aspect of effective development assistance, including journalism and management training, technological capacity-building, and – most critically – the enabling legal, political and economic environment required for the media to operate freely and effectively in the public interest.
By Bettina Peters, GFMD Director
and Subendran Ravindran, GFMD website officer
A cell phone news service in India is reaching remote communities and a microblog in China is scooping traditional media, participants of the 3rd Bali Media Forum in Denpasar, Bali, heard last month.
The forum was organized by GFMD in cooperation with the Indonesian Press Council and the Institute for Peace and Democracy. It was supported by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.
India
Smita Choudhary presented a project, CGNet Swara, an audio-based citizen-journalism service in the isolated community of Chhattisgarh, supported by the Knight International Journalism Fellowship Program. Using their mobile phones, people can call a number to record news, or they can call in to hear news recorded by others in their communities. They simply press 1 to record news, or press 2 to hear the last three items that system moderators have selected to be published onto the service. The system is operated by an Internet platform that calls the caller back so that there is virtually no charge to people wanting to listen to CGNet.
The moderators are professionally trained journalists. They receive notice via e-mail when a citizen journalist posts content, after which they check it (sometimes adding that a report isn’t verified, sometimes investigating more, on a case-by-case basis). Then they edit the recording and publish it.
CGNet Swara moderators use a Google SMS channel (a free SMS group service in India) to send out an SMS after a news report is published. The SMS includes the phone number to call to hear the report. Selected stories are sent out to the CGNet mailing list, an open list made up of citizens, activists, mainstream journalists, and others who are interested in the Chhattisgarh region.
“Our service is working well because people do not need to be able to read or write,” Choudhary said. “Given the low literacy level in the Chhattisgarh region, any news service that wants to reach and involve the rural communities must be audio-based.”
China
Yuen Ying Chan, dean of journalism at China’s Shantou University, presented a case study on microblogging in China, illustrating how social media sites are ahead of traditional print and broadcast media in distributing news.
“A few weeks ago someone posted news about a road accident on the microblogger site Weibo, and within seconds 7 million users commented, highlighting the need for better road safety,” explained Ying Chan, who is a member of the GFMD Steering Committee. “Because of the debate on Weibo the story made it into the Beijing print media.”
The Weibo website is a type of Twitter and Facebook hybrid. It is one of the most popular social media sites in China, in use by well over 30 percent of Internet users – a similar market penetration as Twitter in the United States. It was launched by SINA Corp. on August 14, 2009, and had more than 250 million registered users as of October 2011. Ying Chan said censorship of news, which was common practice in China in the 1970s and 1980s, was no longer a viable option for the government.
“Social media and blogs in China get most stories first and independent news gets distributed widely via the Internet and mobile phones long before the state media pick up the story,” she told the gathering. “It is impossible to control all these sites.”
Core Standards
The 35 participants from 17 countries agreed that core standards of journalism should extend to media companies on social media sites.
They adopted this statement: “The independent, self-regulatory rules governing media should extend to media organizations’ own use of social media. These profiles are clear extensions of the editorial material published through other channels and therefore fall under their editorial responsibility.
“Personal blogs by journalists not linked to their media organizations are individuals’ expression of opinion, but ethical in-house rules should be discussed to ensure that ethical standards also guide personal blogs and expressions by journalists.”
More information and all background documents can be downloaded on the GFMD website: http://gfmd.info/index.php/regions/bali_media_forum_2011/
By Bettina Peters, GFMD Director
and Patrick Leusch, Deutsche Welle-Akademie
The Arab Spring showed the world the speed and reach of new media as catalyst. But traditional newsrooms still claim the role of fact checker. And then there’s the problem of access to the new technologies by the world’s poor. Those points and more were raised in a debate last month in Warsaw, Poland, as part of European Development Days. At issue was how the emergence of social media changes media development strategies by the European Union and other policymakers.
The panel discussion, organized by GFMD in partnership with one of its members, the Deutsche Welle-Akademie, and with the think tank Friends of Europe brought together policymakers, journalists and media development practitioners.
The galvanizing power of social media to bypass official channels of communication – which are all too often censored in the developing world – has created the possibility for the transmission of immediate and uncensored information from people in need to an audience all over the globe. Moving forward, moderator Patrick Leusch asked the panel: What role could these new technologies and systems play in the next phase of sustaining the democratic process?
The Arab Spring countries have undergone a difficult transition, replied panelist Moeed Ahmad, head of new media at Al Jazeera, but they now face an even more difficult rebuilding process.
“Social media made it easier to organize the mass movements responsible for the resignation of these leaders. Now the countries are in a phase of consensus building and creating platforms and agendas with smaller groups of people,” he said. “If the leaders ignore what the people are transmitting on social media and focus on traditional centers of power as they are like to do, they will fail.”
Though relevant, the importance of the phenomenon of the civil society journalist must not be overblown, Ahmad cautioned. In Egypt and Tunisia, as opposed to the other Arab Spring protests that met with less success, social media were married to a broadcaster that was covering the story and listening to what the protesters were saying.
“We are moving from a gatekeeper paradigm to a networking paradigm in journalism. The newsroom will remain the focal point for broadcast and accountability, but this concept of networked journalism will continue to grow,” predicted Amadou Mahtar Ba, director of the African Media Initiative. It is essential for the development community and leaders in the developing world to focus on building media literacy, he added: “It is what empowers our societies and our citizenry. It is from knowledge of the media that change can occur.”
“Regardless of how loud they are, people using social media are only a small percentage of the population,” Ahmad reminded the gathering. He argued that the digital divide between those who have access to information technologies and those who do not needs to be addressed by groups working in global development.
In fact, half the world’s population does not have computers or Internet access, said Mark Wilson, executive director of Panos London. “While we know that social media have a phenomenal capacity for organization and the dissemination of information we need some perspective,” he cautioned. “Democracy 3.0 sounds fantastic, but poor and marginalized communities are outside of this world.”
The root of this issue is global poverty, he continued. Citing Oxford University’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, he said that of the roughly 1.6 billion people in the world considered poor, 1.2 billion are to be found in middle-income countries.
“Poor people are using and want to use mobile phones and Internet-ready devices for social means,” he said. “We must accept that social media are becoming a tool for democracy and better accountability and connect them to the traditional media. There is a world out there that needs to be brought up to basic technological capabilities.”
The development community has a lot of ground to cover in this respect, he concluded. “Once we begin to consider the issues of traditional and new media, media literacy and the necessary infrastructures in a more holistic way, we can make a powerful tool for all people, not just for the small elite.”
The European Commission and other development players recognize the importance of media in general to the development of democracy, offered Klaus Rudischhauser, director of the European Commission’s Directorate for Development. “Social media are extremely important in this context,” he said. “We still need effective and transparent traditional media and should include the new media as part of the overall landscape.”
“Most traditional media do not understand how social media is impacting their processes,” proposed Ahmad. Sharing his experience at Al Jazeera, he explained that prior to the onset of the protests in Tunisia, traditionalists in the broadcaster’s newsroom were reluctant to accept footage unless it met specific standards of quality. “This was a huge challenge to overcome,” he said, “but without the videos taken with handheld devices by regular people on the streets, we would not have witnessed what was happening.”
In closing remarks, GFMD Dir. Bettina Peters said government and the private sector must invest more in the new information structures that are circling the world. Whether computers or the mobile Internet devices favored in much of the developing world, the systems support democracy by letting governments communicate with people – and vice versa.
Media literacy is another area which calls for more investment, offered Peters. “There is a difference between freedom of the media and freedom of expression,” she said. “Investment in media literacy will help citizens to better understand this distinction.” A more informed populace could also go a long way toward addressing the question of the accountability of social media content producers, the panel agreed.
“Essentially, the issue of social media development comes back to the empowerment of the individual,” she said. “If an individual’s voice can be heard, it can accomplish great things.”
Rudischhauser summed up the discussion by the panel: “Investment in communication infrastructure, investment in media literacy and investment in free and pluralistic media overall should be an important part of development policies. The policy goal to free the media and to free access to communication technologies is also the goal of the European Union.”
The full conclusions of the debate can be downloaded at: http://gfmd.info/index.php/news/gfmd_puts_media_on_the_agenda_at_the_european_development_days/.
The whole debate can be watched on: http://eudevdays.eu.
Patrick H. Leusch is head of Deutsche Welle-Akademie’s Project Development Division, responsible for international networking and fundraising. Leusch, a native of Belgium, has worked as an editor and reporter for leading TV and radio stations in Germany, including serving as the deputy West Africa correspondent for German public broadcaster ARD. For DW-Akademie he has trained journalists and broadcast executives in Africa, Asia and the Arab world since 1998.
In this regular feature, GFMD acquaints its members with a wealth of free resources available to you and the media you support. Help yourselves to the tools you can use, and please send us your own suggestions of other free resources that GFMD members could find helpful.
The tool: Twitter for Newsrooms (#TfN)
It provides: A comprehensive collection of tools to make the most of Twitter in news gathering and disseminating. Instruction is divided into five categories and includes: Reporting: finding and verifying information, sources, and impacted people; Engaging: effective tweeting; Publishing: tools; Extra: support and blogs; and Security: checklist.
Helpful to: Journalists, citizen reporters, news outlets and media development organizations that want to skillfully use mobile technology.
Developed by: Twitter
Find it at: https://dev.twitter.com/media/newsrooms
The following excerpts some of the columnist’s reflections on the recent international gathering in South Korea by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The full article is available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/trust/.
Three and a half thousand people have been meeting in Busan, South Korea, to discuss the future of development assistance. The 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness is a tedious name for an important process – how best to organize the billions of dollars of development assistance designed to improve the lives of the poorest people on the planet.
Aid has many critics, and the choice of hosting this meeting in South Korea was designed as a riposte to some of them. In opening the conference, Lee Myung-bak, the South Korean president, passionately paid tribute to the role aid had played in enabling his country’s transformation from a war-ravaged wreck to one of the most vibrant industrial and democratic success stories in the world – all in little more than a generation. Once dependent on foreign aid, it is now an increasingly influential and confident aid donor, with an annual aid budget of $1 billion and a determination to substantially increase this in the future.
There have been important successes in the aid process; the number of developing countries with “sound” national development strategies has tripled since 2005, and organized donor support to such strategies has improved.
Successes are, however, greatly outweighed by failures. Very limited progress has been made in enhancing the capacity of a developing country’s citizens to subject aid spending or national development policies to real scrutiny.
The main objective of Busan was to form a new “Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation” which could accommodate the new donors.
But with many new actors entering the field, is there a point where the search for consensus comes at the price of effectiveness? Many of the emerging economies are pursuing their own national interests in their aid policies, just as Western countries have done. The carefully calibrated language of the Busan outcome document is that of the lowest common denominator. It is short on clear, time-bound indicators and hard targets. The drafts and final text of the declaration coming out of Busan have been tailored to make it more palatable to new, emerging economy entrants. The danger is that the broader the consensus, the shallower it becomes and that some important things get left out.
GFMD had been working hard in the months leading up to the Busan conference to push for specific recognition of the important role free, independent and pluralistic media play in development. Media are also key to making the issues discussed at Busan relevant to and resonant with those who have most to win or lose from the outcome of these debates.
In the run up to Busan over the last couple of years, we have also helped organize meetings with and worked alongside the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee to document evidence supporting the role of media as an accountability mechanism and to highlight its relevance to aid effectiveness.
The word ‘media’ does not appear in the Busan declaration despite recommendations coming from the preparatory processes and synthesis (PDF) of findings on ownership and accountability recognizing its role.
There are defensible reasons for this, and too many negotiations of this kind insist on listing every group in society anyone feels is important. However, important emphasis is placed on parliaments and civil society organizations as key sources of accountability. The omission of any language on a free media as a source of political accountability looks odd.
It is more puzzling still given this meeting takes place in the winter following the Arab Spring. It is not just the reconfiguration of power moving from West to East and North to South that is happening. Growing access to new communication technologies and independent media is enabling more power to shift from governments to citizens, from institutions to networks, from elites to masses, from old to young.
The Busan process places a strong and welcome emphasis on issues of aid transparency and opening up access to information on budgets and government processes and on the importance of civil society. It seems oblivious, however, to these wider changes in how citizens are holding their governments to account.
A central hypothesis remains behind the Busan process that it is governments that shape development. Perhaps, but the world is changing in broader ways than the simple shifting of international economic and power balances. Information-empowered people, companies and civil societies are increasingly driving change. A central focus on the role of the state makes sense. However, present that case to the citizens of many of the Arab Spring countries and you may get a very different perspective.
There were real achievements at this meeting. The benefits of consensus were clear – a fresh energy around aid transparency, a new and important agreement on aid to fragile states, and the creation of a more global aid framework capable of accommodating very diverse aid actors.
The costs are less clear, but to this observer very real. We should get better at counting them.
James Deane is Head of Policy at the BBC World Service Trust in London. He also writes regularly on the media and development policy blog at http://www.comminit.com/en/development_policy. Please email any questions for James to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). James Deane last wrote on reaching more donors in the September 2011 GFMD Insider.
Training is a common activity for media development organizations and the media they support. Sometimes this training is domestic, and often it is international. The organizations often turn to working journalists and other experts to provide training in basic journalism skills, investigative reporting, the ethics of journalism, editing strategies, digital techniques, the use of multimedia in reporting, the use of mobile technology for transmitting news, and any number of other topics.
The desired outcomes of such training often include new knowledge, new beliefs or attitudes, new skills, and ultimately, changed media practices. Those who attend such trainings should know things they didn’t know before, should believe that embracing what they have been taught is important, should have the skills to use what they have learned, and their work should show that they can actually do what they have been taught. Documenting whether these gains are achieved requires measurement over time – using pre- and post-program tests or surveys, as well as collecting and comparing the participants’ work before and after they receive training.
To measure such outcomes, evaluators need to know specifically what each training course will offer. Often, however, evaluators have to work from a list of topics to be covered rather than from a complete curriculum for each topic. Problems arise when trainers are not required to disclose the detailed substance of their lessons. The table below is intended to illustrate the difference between a topic and a more complete curriculum.
When evaluators only have the topic, on the left, they do not have the specific information that trainees should learn. In this example, they do not know what to look for in the participants’ subsequent stories, if they want to judge whether sourcing has improved. If they have the curriculum information on the right it becomes possible to fashion knowledge questions about at least these three rules of good sourcing. Attitude questions can be designed to ask trainees, for example, how important it is to have non-anonymous sources. Journalistic output of trainees produced before and after the training course can be coded to see the extent to which stories follow these three principles. Without this kind of detailed information about what a training course will offer, even evaluators who know the journalism field well cannot count on the specific content delivered by a given trainer and thus are at a loss to ensure alignment of evaluation materials with training content.
Insisting on a content-specific curriculum from trainers is also a useful management tool to ensure that training is of the highest quality and meets the standards of the media group offering the program. Funders who pay for training programs likewise want assurance that the training being offered is current and accurate.
Like textbooks, training syllabi or curricula often begin with the goals or objectives for each training session. For example:
At the conclusion of this session, trainees will know how to integrate print, interviews, use of graphs and charts, as well as audio and video to produce multimedia stories.
Then, a thorough curriculum might specify what a new multimedia reporter needs to know about each of these technologies, their particular strengths and best uses, the timing for each, and how to integrate them into a single story. In other words, a thorough curriculum provides not only the topics of a training but also the content of each topic – the answers to the questions that might appear on an evaluation instrument or the actual coding categories to be used in assessing work quality. Then an evaluator can fashion this content into measurable instruments to gauge the degree to which this content was absorbed, valued and used by trainees.
In the absence of a curriculum, evaluators often fall back on asking trainees how much they think they know about a topic. This is a much weaker evaluation strategy than actually testing what they know and sometimes leads to dismaying results. Trainees might believe that they know a lot about a topic before the training, only to discover that they don’t know as much as they thought they did. The evaluation will show that self perceptions of knowledge actually decline after the training.
Another advantage of asking trainers to develop curricula is the accumulation of curricula and evaluation tools for the field. Surely journalism would profit from an extensive, emerging library of both brief and more extensive curricula on key topics in the profession. While some such curricula do exist, there is room for additional work here. This would, in turn, lead to the emergence of evaluation strategies that are well aligned with these training programs. The resulting “package” of training materials and evaluation instruments could then be used repeatedly, especially if they are shown to be effective. Many fields develop a scientific base for their programs through this process, saving time and resources – and gradually coming to offer training programs that have been well tested for their effectiveness.
Susan Philliber is a founder and senior partner at Philliber Research Associates, a New York-based company that specializes in evaluating and planning for organizational effectiveness. Please submit questions or suggestions for future columns to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Susan Philliber last wrote on assessing cell phone networks in the September 2011 GFMD Insider.
The past 12 months have been important for new developments in technology. Mobile phones and social networks helped activate the Arab Spring, while tablet devices and free content available online helped shudder one of America’s largest national book sellers (Borders). We expect that the tech trends in 2012 will be just as sweeping and intensive. Here are five predictions for what’s to come.
China Rising
By the beginning of this year more than 550 million Chinese are expected to be online – 6 million new users are going online every month – and nearly half of new Internet users will use a mobile device to access content. China has more mobile users per capita than any other country in the world, and most people upgrade their phones at least every 12 months. Baidu, a Chinese-based Google rival, now handles more than 80 percent of all search queries in China and is re-emerging as a music service and news content source. It has even launched an Android competitor, Yi. The Internet continues to grow and evolve daily, and more of it is being shaped by and for a Chinese audience. Meantime, government crackdowns and monitoring will continue to be a major human rights – and media – issue in 2012.
Privacy Concerns
We are uploading millions of photos every day to social networks, and in the process we’re attaching rich data along with them: who’s in the photo, where the photo was taken, even what equipment was used. Combined with social check-in services, which continually show our physical locations and who we’re with, a number of clever search tools have emerged that can effortlessly divulge a person’s name, age and interests simply by snapping a photo of his or her face. While sophisticated users have expressed concerns about their privacy, younger mobile and social network users are more and more willing to share everything with everyone. Facebook continues to change its terms of service often, but most users aren’t aware of what personal information is being shared with the outside world. This is an especially important trend for media development organizations, which work in dangerous areas of the world. It’s become easier than ever to learn someone’s identity and to track them, which puts journalists at high risk. What – if anything – to do about our digital privacy will be an ongoing discussion throughout the year.
Ethics Concerns and Digital Content
In 2011, there were numerous high-profile ethics questions at major tech/journalism companies. Tech blogger Michael Arrington launched a $20 million venture capital fund that would invest in many of the companies covered by his publication, TechCrunch. Microblogging platform Tumblr, which is used by many in the fashion industry, made news when it sent 16 bloggers to Fashion Week shows at their hosts’ expense. Tumblr was charging brands as much as $350,000 for private events with bloggers, and in return brands would receive guaranteed product placement within blog posts. The What’s Trending Web series on CBSNews.com posted a tweet that Steve Jobs had died (well in advance of his actual death), and then issued a snarky response: “Apologies – reports of Steve Job’s [sic] death completely unconfirmed. Live on.” What’s Trending, however, did not live on, and all mention of the show as well as all of its content was pulled from the site. As the media landscape continues to evolve, journalists and others will need to question their activities and discuss what’s appropriate and why. Will transparency be the new objectivity?
Technology Leads Revolutions
The Arab revolutions in 2011 were enabled because of Facebook, Twitter, text messaging and BlackBerry’s Messenger service. The ease of use of social networks, combined with the ubiquity of inexpensive mobile devices, has empowered the previously disenfranchised. Due to the success of organized movements in the Middle East, even more groups will use mobile phones and social networks to catalyze their own revolutions around the world this year.
Digital Identity Authentication
When Google launched its new social network, Plus, it made headlines for requiring users to create accounts with their real names and identities. At the time, Google argued that people behave better when they use their real names – it even went so far as to call Plus not a social network but a digital identity service. Some are now questioning how and when Google would be using our digital identities. This may actually prove a benefit to media organizations, which can use this technology to verify sources. Outside of social media, police departments in the United States have started using MORIS, which snaps on to an iPhone and enables officers to scan the irises of alleged criminals. In Brazil, police offers are starting to fit glasses with biometric cameras that can scan 46,000 data points on a face and query a criminal database in real time. Siri, an application acquired by Apple for the iPhone, can recognize individual voices and infer contextual information based on the user. In 2012, our fingerprints may not matter nearly as much as our eyes, faces and usernames.
If you would like more information on these and other tech trends for 2012, click here to view or download a white paper (PDF). http://webbmediagroup.com/annual-report-tech-trends-2012
Amy Webb is the CEO of Webbmedia Group, an international digital strategy firm that helps media and other organizations use technology. Amy Webb last wrote on group messaging services in the September 2011 GFMD Insider.
Amy Webb is the CEO of Webbmedia Group, an international digital strategy firm that helps media and other organizations use technology. http://www.webbmediagroup.com. Amy Webb last wrote on group messaging services in the September 2011 GFMD Insider.
There’s nothing like an eventful year to revive spirits in journalism, and 2011 provided headlines in abundance for the beleaguered media industry. The back story of real-time tsunami horror and nuclear crisis in Japan, revolution and sweeping change across the Arab world, and grinding political and economic turbulence in Europe have given media a much-needed lift.
But perhaps the most welcome development is inside journalism itself where issues of ethical conduct and good governance are now the talk of the newsroom.
Much of this is due to a scandal that has simmered for almost a decade in the United Kingdom and which finally boiled over last year, revealing a toxic culture of corporate corruption at the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire.
Revelations of illegal phone hacking, bribery and editorial malpractice led to the closure of Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper – the News of the World – and to the shaming of Murdoch himself who was forced to make a series of public apologies.
In the fallout from this drama some senior editors and executives may yet go to jail, but the wider impact will be felt far beyond the Murdoch media.
It is already contributing to much-needed reflection within news organizations about ethical conduct, corporate responsibility and how to reinvigorate regard for independent, credible and high-quality journalism.
In November, a conference in Hong Kong organized by a new international group of news executives and editors-in-chief – the Global Editors Network – focused attention on the importance of meticulous information gathering and editorial quality control.
One outcome of the discussion, in which I had a hand, was the launch of a new campaign, the Coalition for Ethical Journalism, which will encourage editors and owners to respect basic principles in news gathering and journalism overall.
This theme of breathing new life into the notion of mission in journalism also features in a new book – Human Rights and a Changing Media Landscape – published in December by Thomas Hammarberg, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe.
These developments mark something of a shift in the media debate which in recent years has centered on concern and speculation over the long-term economic future of journalism. Industrywide gloom, particularly in the press, has been accompanied by a sluggish response to the challenges of technology and falling investment in journalism, all of which have, not surprisingly, damaged public confidence and trust.
The Murdoch scandal confirms this decline. But it also opens the door to a promising opportunity. As the participants at the Hong Kong meeting concluded, this is an ideal moment to signal a fresh start for ethical journalism and corporate social responsibility in media.
The Coalition for Ethical Journalism has a timely and compelling mandate – to promote good conduct in newsrooms across all platforms while recognizing that without corporate accountability and honest management journalism will always be diminished.
The coalition program over the next two years will identify best practice in news reporting and highlight actions to promote more effective self-regulation, and more transparent media management.
The initiative should also appeal to media development groups, many of which have tended to give priority to improving the skills of journalists or helping them to be more technology-savvy. Attention must also be paid to the management culture and not least the importance of transparency and accountability in media ownership and administration.
All of this provides a silver lining for the cloud that the Murdoch scandal has cast over journalism, and anyone who wants to find out more should contact me.
Aidan White is the former general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists. He is an adviser on journalism issues for the Council of Europe, the European Union, the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the European Fundamental Rights Agency. He is a board member of the International News Safety Institute. He can be reached at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Aidan White last wrote on new apps and old controls that don’t quit.