Giving international bloggers a global voice from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

International bloggers network offers alternative perspectives on events around the world

Since 2005, the international bloggers network Global Voices has been one of the shining success stories in citizen media: a community of more than 200 bloggers around the world who offer perspectives frequently not heard in the traditional media.

Founded by former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief Rebecca MacKinnon and technologist and Africa expert Ethan Zuckerman while they were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (both are friends), the nonprofit organization with no physical offices offers reports and translations from blogs and citizen media everywhere.

I caught up with Rebecca several months ago to get an overview of the organization’s efforts. Global Voices’ importance and reach have grown even more pronounced during 2009 with the street demonstrations in Iran. Regular followers of Global Voices have been able to get a first-hand glimpse of events in all corners of the globe, from Africa and Southeast Asia to Oceana and South America. See their Special Coverage section and Top 10 video posts of 2009.

Rebecca, who also teaches journalism at the University of Hong Kong, describes Global Voices as a site where the editors curate the best of what bloggers are saying outside the Western blogosphere. “Where are the most interesting Middle Eastern and African bloggers and what are they talking about? What are Chinese bloggers saying?” The site’s bottom-line goal is to curate the most interesting conversations that will give you a different perspective on what’s happening around the world.

She also describes the goals of two Global Voices projects:

• Rising Voices: “One of the problems with blogs around the world is that bloggers tend to be the elites in many societies,” she says. So, with help from the Knight Foundation, they set up Rising Voices to give small grants to citizens groups around the world in disadvantaged communities to help people create citizen media, particularly blogs and videoblogs.

• Global Voices Advocacy: One problem is that when bloggers around the world start to speak out, some repressive governments have blocked sites and domain and put people in jail for blogging. The Advocacy arm of Global Voices advocates for the rights and interests of those bloggers.

Global Voices content is now translated by grassroots supporters into more than 15 languages.

Looking down the road, Rebecca says Global Voices is continuing to look at professional-amateur journalism partnerships. “How do we help professional journalists connect better with this global convnersation that’s taking place? How can they collaborate with bloggers to get stories out that aren’t getting reported?”

You should add a Global Voices RSS feed to your news reader — it’s a project that’s giving voice to people in some of the most disadvantaged spots on the globe.

Related

• My interview with Global Voices’ other co-founder, Ethan Zuckerman (2007)

• Check out the Kiva Fellows blog: Stories from the field

• Global Voices Online: Finding alternative revenue streams as a non-profit org (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

The post Global Voices: Lifting up the powerless & voiceless appeared first on Socialbrite.

A cause campaign to fight malaria from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Causeitsmybirthday.com raises $16,000, effort continues through Saturday

Socialbrite’s own Sloane Berrent has been a bit busy of late. Fresh off a three-month stay in the rural Philippines doing field work as a Kiva fellow, she and her friend Doug Campbell of Mindshare launched Causeitsmybirthday, a cause campaign with a wild premise: parties in seven major cities on seven consecutive nights to raise money for malaria nets for orphanages and refugee camps in northern Ghana.

Malaria kills 3,000 children a day. It has killed more people than all the wars in human history combined, causing 1 to 3 million deaths per year. And the tragedy is that the majority of those deaths could be prevented with simple actions such as putting up mosquito nets to ward off the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. (This YouTube video explains why nets are so effective in the battle against malaria.)

I’ve never seen an effort quite like this, but Sloane, who blogs at TheCausemopolitan, and Doug pulled it off, working with the small nonprofit Netting Nations to make sure that 100 percent of the charitable donations go toward malaria nets. As of today, they’ve raised more than $16,000 and, even though the seven-city tour is over, you can donate to the cause online through Saturday. (Use the PayPal widget at the left.)

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo
Watch the video in QuickTime H.264 on Ourmedia

“People want to be inspired, and they want to be engaged, and they want to be involved,” says Sloane, a force of nature (like our other Socialbrite colleagues). She came up with the idea because she wanted her 30th birthday (last week) to be about giving instead of getting and she “wanted to use birthday as a platform for social change.” It’s a great idea, one that we’ve seen Beth Kanter use to good advantage in recent years, but now the social tools are mature enough to tie together online and offline activities.

Increasingly, sites are helping to connect people so that they meet up in person, and Causeitsmybirthday worked because it gave people a portal to get information about the cause but it also a way to meet offline. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to the project.) Sloane talks about how social media can be used for grassroots efforts on behalf of any kind of cause.

We conducted the interview at night, outside the Eve Lounge and Kate O’Brien’s in San Francisco, on the sixth night of the seven-city swing through New York, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle and finally Los Angeles.

Sloane also talks about her recent experience as a Kiva fellow. Kiva now operates in 55 countries with more than 120 partners.

“We hope that by doing this 7-city tour, people will be inspired to do something like this on their own,” she says. Perhaps an event that’s not quite so ambitious, but something that makes a difference.

So do we at Socialbrite.

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For the annual conference of the Online News Association this weekend, I’ve pulled together two new printable handouts: 8 ways to use social media in the newsroom, available at http://bit.ly/social-flyer, and 6 Twitter tools for journalists (PDF — and see the accompanying post). I’m speaking on the aptly named Social Media Mania panel on Saturday.

I think these are two of the nicer handouts I’ve produced, using Apple Pages, part of the iWork suite. These downloadable documents are part of the ongoing series of social media guides and tutorials that Socialbrite has been producing for social change organizations, nonprofits, journalists and anyone interested in effective use of social media.

While the PDFs are spiffy-looking, they’re less than optimal for search engines and for the disabled, so I’ll mirror the handouts here in html.

8 ways to use social media in the newsroom

FriendFeed

1An uber-aggregator of your feeds, FriendFeed is like Twitter but easier to organize. You can post more than 140 characters, organize private or public rooms and get a feed of your friends as an e-mail. But FriendFeed is more than an aggregation tool: It’s a virtual watering hole where you can see what’s on the mind of your friends and colleagues.

Search the real-time Web

2Find out what people are talking about online right now — chances are you can turn a meme into a story. Tools include Twitter Search, Tweetmeme, OneRiot, Scoopler.

Flip out!

3We’re all multimedia journalists now, right? Never let another eye-catching moment or newsworthy subject slip by: A Flip cam ($199 for hi-def version) lets you easily add a visual element to a story. Users are more likely to jump into a conversation around a video on your site than a text-only article. Kodak’s Zi8 is also a good choice.

Skype

4The service, which is free for Skype-to-Skype calls and inexpensive for calls to land and mobile lines, lets you conduct and record interviews with industry leaders in the US or overseas. A nice bonus: You can capture it as a video chat, upload it to YouTube, embed it and invite readers to comment on your site.

Start an instant social network

5That’s what NPR’s Andy Carvin did with the Ning. Dozens of people chipped in valuable info as Hurricane Gustav rumbled toward landfall. You needn’t wait for a disaster: Pop open a free social network on Ning (or a similar site like KickApps) around a topic that may generate community interest.

Become an online radio host

6Sign up with BlogTalkRadio (it’s free) to host live call-in shows about your beat or specialty. Do it weekly to gather a following.

Live blogging

7Live-blogging a newsworthy event has an advantage over live-tweeting: Your coverage can generate comments for months. CoveritLive is the best of the lot; it includes integration with Twitter, Qik for live video and YouTube pre-recorded video.

Upload & embed video

8Lots of large companies have begun creating YouTube channels. And even more have begun embedding high-quality videos, like TED Talks. Nervous? Sites like Magnify.net, Viddler, Kaltura and Brightcove offer paid commercial uploads.

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A brief guide for citizen journalists and bloggers

Target audience: Journalists, bloggers, nonprofits, cause organizations, NGOs, general public.

Guest post by Mitch Ratcliffe
RatcliffeBlog

There is much that bloggers can learn from journalists, who have learned how to cause the most trouble possible without landing in jail over the course of centuries. I highly recommend you pick up a copy of The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law ($13 at Amazon.com, which is the essential text for many journalists.

In addition, here’s a good source for students and other beginners.

If you want to go deep and learn a lot, read this piece from the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Journalists’ Handbook.

It’s worth understanding this stuff even if you don’t want to be a journalist, because anyone can be sued for libel, slander or defamation.

The first thing to understand about all subjects relating to journalists’ privileges is that they are different everywhere. There is no international standard set of laws, though journalistic professional societies have pressed for these kinds of uniform expectations. Most of what I’ll lay out here relates to the United States, where the press enjoy the most liberal protections available. In Canada, for example, there is no presumption that a journalist can protect their source. In much of Europe, the subjects of photographs retain far greater control of pictures through their moral rights (PDF), or “droit moral,” which provides both the photographer and the subject protection from the unauthorized reuse of the image in whole or in part — juxtaposing the image of a person into an advertisement, for instance, which is common in digital media is prohibited without their permission.

Elements of defamation

Defamation, slander and libel are the same thing, essentially, but each is defined based on the way a false statement about a person is conveyed. According to ExpertLaw.com’s entry on Defamation, Libel and Slander Law, the general principle behind all three must include the following elements:

1. A false and defamatory statement concerning another;
2. The unprivileged publication of the statement to a third party (that is, somebody other than the person defamed by the statement);
3. If the defamatory matter is of public concern, fault amounting at least to negligence on the part of the publisher; and
4. Damage to the plaintiff.

In the context of defamation law, a statement is “published” when it is made to the third party. That term does not mean that the statement has to be in print.

Damages are typically to the reputation of the plaintiff, but depending upon the laws of the jurisdiction it may be enough to establish mental anguish.

Most jurisdictions also recognize “per se” defamation, where the allegations are presumed to cause damage to the plaintiff. Typically, the following may consititute defamation per se:

• Attacks on a person’s professional character or standing;

• Allegations that an unmarried person is unchaste;

• Allegations that a person is infected with a sexually transmitted disease;

• Allegations that the person has committed a crime of moral turpitude.

Libel is committed when a statement that meets the standard above is published in a document, whether a newspaper, magazine, book or Web site. Bloggers need to keep this firmly in mind when writing about someone, especially someone who is not a public figure (we’ll get to that in a moment).

A slander is a spoken defamation, whether that act of speech is public and one-time or recorded and redistributed. Slander also includes defamation by gesture, which could include making a gesture that suggests professional incompetence or mental illness. Slander carries the additional burden for a plaintiff of having to prove that they suffered actual loss due to the false statement.

If you are webcasting, podcasting, producing digital video or otherwise using the Internet to convey information that may be construed to be slanderous, this is the branch of defamation law about which you need to be aware. RTNDA, the Association of Electronic Journalists, offers a deep resource on the use of many different kinds of information in a broadcast that deals with a variety of liabilities and ethical questions radio and television journalists face.

In all cases, the truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel, slander or defamation (except in totalitarian countries or those not under the rule of law, where a judge can rule arbitrarily in favor of a powerful person). If you are going to call someone “a crook” or “a philanderer,” for example, be sure that you can prove they are a criminal or that they are stepping out on their spouse or carrying on multiple affairs simultaneously. Be ready for challenges to your proof, so don’t take for granted that one item of proof is sufficient.

But the truth is a relative thing, because public figures are the subject of varied opinions which the writer or producer is largely convinced. Public figures have to prove that the writer or speaker willfully ignored the truth or acted with flagrant disregard to the truth. And that is hard to prove. In the case of Dan Rather’s broadcast accusing President Bush of having avoided his National Guard service based on documents it failed to vet completely, the fact that it involved a source’s documents insulated CBS from charges of slander and libel (since they both broadcast and published articles on the cbs.com Web site).

Fox News has mastered the practice of deflecting an accusation by attribution, as in the phrase “people say…” or “according to sources” before leveling an untrue or highly opinionated statement. This is not a defense against libel or slander if the criteria described above are met. The burden for a journalist would then fall to the question of whether a source really made the accusation. And this is where the issue of confidentiality comes in.

Confidentiality

The confidentiality of sources involves protections that are somewhat mythical. In many jurisdictions, including the United States, there is no guarantee that a journalist can protect her sources. It’s not in the U.S. Constitution, but has been interpreted to be a journalist’s privilege in a number of state and federal cases. Shield laws have been passed in many cities and states, but these do not protect someone publishing on the Web, who may be indicted in another jurisdiction that has no such laws.

Confidentiality is grossly abused these days, in my humble opinion. It is used by government and corporate officials who should be on the record when they launch test balloons, make attacks on opponents and much else. It is also just plain lazy on many journalists’ part, because they should use a background statement to delve into the truth in order to get the facts on the record. But in the race to make a scoop — and, unfortunately, many journalists just think being first, rather than being complete and accurate, is paramount — solid sourcing often goes out the window.

Sources can sue you for libel or slander, as well, if they dispute what words you put in their mouths. This is why a journalist’s notes are so terribly important. In one case, a journalist whose source disputed a phrase lost the case because the words were in his notebook but not in quotes. A journalist learns to annotate carefully because of these kinds of realities.

Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post made a historically important and correct decision to protect the identity of a senior Nixon Administration official who guided them in their reporting of Watergate: Deep Throat. In May 2005, a former top FBI official named Mark Felt went public in Vanity Fair and acknowledged he was Deep Throat, but Woodward and Bernstein and their editors never revealed their source.

If the source has something to lose and can demonstrate it is materially important to them, then confidentiality may be necessary. If confidentiality is a convenience for the source, you’re better off doing more footwork yourself.

Attribution

This brings us to the issue of attribution and knowing when and why to go from being on the record with a source. Always begin a conversation by identifying yourself as a journalist (or a blogger writing “on the record”), if you want to enjoy any of the protections normally accorded to a journalist; begin and stay on the record until it becomes necessary to go off the record.

After “on the record,” which means you can write or broadcast anything said in the conversation, comes terms such as “on background,” “off the record” and their many hues. In a background conversation, you can write down what is being said but cannot attribute it directly to the source — they become generally identifiable to the reader as “a source in the Defense Department” or “a senior manager at Example Corp.” Remember that background information still needs to be confirmed elsewhere, so don’t be afraid to take the conversation back on the record to try to get the information in an attributed quote; background conversations are a matter of convenience for the source and are increasingly given by news organizations only with a compelling reason.

We’re talking here about how you handle relationships with people. We all know that there are times and circumstances that demand we protect confidentiality. Sometimes a source is giving you information that will get the person who really needs to be on the record to speak, because you come to them with information that, once they know you have it, they have to address on the record. This has worked for me with corporations, two White House administrations and a variety of other situations. What I want to emphasize is that a background quote or an off-the-record or confidential source does not make a publishable story in all but the most extreme cases. Can you prevent a catastrophe with an off-the-record quote? Publish! If it’s a matter of getting a scoop, do more legwork.

That’s it in a nutshell, the beginning of a lifetime of exploration and growing subtlety if you want to jump into the journalist’s role in society.

Related

• See other Socialbrite articles on law and citizen media

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1. The best way to maintain accuracy is to develop a system and stick to it.

2. Take the extra seconds to read back to the interviewee the spelling of his or her name. If you need an age, ask for a birth date and year.

3. Avoid using secondary sources to verify facts.

4. If you have to use secondary sources, find at least two and make sure they agree independently; don’t simply ask one to confirm what the other said.

5. Verify phone/fax numbers, web and email addresses. For example, copy the url from the document and paste it into a browser. Call the phone number.

When you write

1. Consult your documentary sources – notebook, printed materials – as you’re writing. If you don’t want to interrupt the writing flow, make sure to put a mark reminding you to double-check it later. “ck” for “check” is a standard proofreader’s mark. “cq” is shorthand for “this is accurate”; it is often used with unusual spellings, facts and figures.
2. Identify your sources. Your readers need to know where this information comes from so they can judge its credibility.

3. Show transparency. If someone appears to be an expert, that’s one thing. If they also have a financial or other stake in one version of the story, that’s another. Be skeptical. Good journalists have to assume that everyone, even people they like, may sometimes shade the truth.

4. Don’t confuse opinions with facts. Opinions make personal journalism lively, but make sure your readers know what is fact and what is an opinion.

After you write

1. Leave fact checking and editing for last. If you want to do a thorough copy edit, print out the content. Spell-check your work!

2. Proofread your corrections for readability. (Be careful, because sometimes you can accidentally introduce a new error.) Make sure your corrections haven’t affected the sentence and paragraph they are in.

3. Assemble all your source materials – notebooks, interview transcripts, tapes, books, studies, photos, everything you’ve used to report and write your story. Then go over every word in the story and compare     it to the original source. On projects and even on daily stories, some reporters make a printout just for names and titles, another for quotes, a third for other details.

4. Fact check. Many magazines use professional fact checkers, and they still manage to make mistakes frequently. People may be citing you as a source, so try to get the details right.

5. Call your source back and double-check key facts. If you’re describing a financial transaction, a medical procedure or how a sewer bond works, there’s nothing wrong with calling the source and asking him or her to listen to what you’ve written. Remember: Editors at The Oregonian in Portland concluded that the three most frequent sources of error are working from memory, making assumptions and dealing with second-hand sources. Avoid these whenever possible.

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