A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
Derrick Fountain is an online media professional and visionary craftsman of life enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information.
As the business and editorial structures that have historically sustained media melt away, new innovations in reporting and monetization are rapidly reforming the business. But a key question remains: Can media producers adapt and lead, or will they disappear with Journalism’s Ice Age? The Media Consortium (TMC), a network of the country's leading progressive, independent media outlets, commissioned this research and strategy project to ask: Who produces it, what the audience wants, and how they want to consume it. Media organizations must match their production and delivery strategies to new consumer demand, technology and business models. The research covers three areas:
From the website:
A new-media training organisation that empowers young African men and women to build and pursue a career as reporter and to strengthen the media function in Africa. Visit the progress of our trainees on our Online Training Platform: www.VoicesofAfrica.com.
Voices of Africa Media Foundation has led the Voices of Africa project that trains journalists around Africa to use mobile phones in video and multimedia reporting.
This post was originally published at MediaShift by Guy Berger, Rhodes University. Republished under Creative Commons licensed here. Thank you, Guy!
Online computers, Africans do not have. Cellphones are a different story.
So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places - even in media dense environments.
Answers - and solutions - to this challenge were forthcoming in Grahamstown, South Africa, last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas - a Knight grantee - ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University.
Traditional news media is a changing industry and conversations discussing the future of news media as it transforms itself abound. What is the future of the newsroom in citizen journalism?
SaveTheNews.org, an organization that is devoted to bringing public policy into conversation about the future of news media, hosted a forum in late August where former staff of Rocky Mountain News and journalists from around Denver fielded a host of questions regarding the future of news media. Below are a few highlights of the conversation (transcript available in full here).
As I've mentioned, the Mobile Media Toolkit team will be attending the upcoming Highway Africa conference.
We are excited to meet up with Harry Dugmore and Guy Berger at Rhodes University who have been behind the Lindaba Ziyafika ("The News is Coming") project. The project, motivated by a desire to reach young people in Grahamstown, has taken Grahamstown's newspaper and enabled it for mobile-based citizen contributions.
Af the Afghani elections are coming up this week, there are a projects focusing on the election and citizen media coverage that we like to note.
First, as Taliban has intensified violence and has threatened to disrupt the elections and "kill those who vote," the Afghani government has called for reporters to avoid coverage of violence so that Afghanis aren't scared away from polling stations. Meanwhile, associations such as the Independent Journalist Association of Afghanistan have refused to take the order and has promised to continue reporting. The ban on reporting is phrased as a "request" in English, and as "strictly forbidden" in Dari (good synopsis of ban and violence here).
As Afghanistan's second democratic elections nears on August 20th, journalists are gearing up for fair and accurate reporting. The NGO Nai and the media development organization Internews have trained journalists and civil society workers over the past few months in fair and accurate reporting. Training includes, according to Internews, "active learning practices, the understanding of regulatory information on all aspects of the elections, and the importance of fair reportage."
New media technologies played a major role in the events leading up to and following the 2009 Iranian elections and are likely to continue to have a tremendous impact. Social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogging have changed the way Iranian citizens communicate with each other as well as with the outside world. From cell phone cameras capturing scenes of violence that otherwise would go unreported to Twitter feeds used to organize massive protests, new media have forever changed the nature of citizen participation, not just in Iran, but throughout the world.
Despite the impact of these technologies during the Iranian elections, relatively little definitive information has been gathered about their specific role in the elections and subsequent protests. What are the implications of these new technologies for democracy in Iran? How have both the opposition and the government used these new tools against each other in what some call an “Internet battlefield”? Do the users of new media adequately represent the Iranian population? How has the Iranian government attempted to censor or curb the use of these new tools?
In presentations and discussions during a panel discussion held by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), new media practitioners, Iran specialists, and interested observers attempted to clarify the role of new media in the Iranian elections and the implications of these technologies for future democratic movements.
Radio remains the most appropriate communication medium for social and development communication in Africa. This study consists of carrying out a base-line study of West African radio connectivity to ICT (internet, satellite, computer, digital storage tools, etc.), analyzing the uses implemented, identifying the constraints and opportunities, and making recommendations to the different stakeholders.
The study concentrates on seven (7) targeted countries (Ghana, Benin, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso & Niger) and concerns all radio stations (public, community, commercial and religious). Two hundred and twenty (220) radio stations took part in the survey. The main tools of research used were questionnaires, interviews and documentary analysis.
The results reveal that overall the average rate of access to the internet by radio stations in the seven (7) countries studied is 51.8 %, with a large disparity according to the country and type of radio. Indeed, while the rate of connectivity is 72.2% for private commercial radio on the one hand, it is limited to 31.5%
for community or non-profit making radio. On the other hand, at a country-wide level, Ghanaian radio has a 93.5% connectivity rate, Senegalese radio 89.7%, whilst only 20% of radio stations in Sierra Leone are connected. In Ghana and Senegal, nearly all commercial radio stations are connected. In addition, 72.7% of Senegalese community radio stations have access to the internet (75% of them have an ADSLline), in contrast to only 8.3% of Nigerien community stations.
The rate of connectivity for all radio stations in Burkina Faso, Benin and Mali, is 61.5%, 55% and 34% respectively. It is thanks to ADSLtechnology that the majority of stations in the sub-region are connected, in particular Senegal, where more than 92 % of stations have access to the worldwide network. As illustrated by the cost of internet access, in certain countries internet use has become more and more accessible, but is limited to regions with good infrastructure.
The strong mobile phone penetration on the continent allows stations to use it as an indispensable tool for reporting and communicating with listeners; this has contributed to today’s large number of radio listeners.
Even though around seventy (70) radio websites have been identified (the majority of them with domain names matching the names of the stations), their presence remains minimal and precarious on the internet. In most countries, live broadcasts on the internet are very unstable (streaming is usually inaccessible) or non-existent, despite being advertised. In addition, a large number of websites have very few - or even no - content.
Mobile value-added services, in particular SMS, used by 83.8% of stations surveyed, have had great success amongst the local population. These new services are considered important tools of interaction between radio stations and listeners and are also a potential source of substantial revenue for radio business.
Convergence between ICTs and radio has brought about results including new multi-use supports which contribute to making radio programmes accessible everywhere throughout the world, and whose coverage, until recently was limited by FM transmitter capacity. The study has shown that in the countries concerned, training in ICTs is not done regularly. In fact, a quarter of the radio stations surveyed stated that their employees have never followed any training. This explains the low level of ICT skills which greatly limits the development of digital products and services in radio stations. Due either to a lack of information or familiarity with ICT, it has also been observed that there is some confusion between free and proprietary software, and even about what kind of internet connection the radio station has.
Panos Institute West Africa released a report in October 2008 exploring the connectivity of West African Radio Stations to the Internet, and their use of other information and communication technology including integration with mobile. The report presents results of a survey that was conducted in 220 radio stations in Ghana, Benin, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
Radio, which "remains the most appropriate communication medium for social and development communication in Africa", does not have great online presence, but has higher use of mobile phone technology. The results vary drastically with type of radio station and the country it is operating in.
Some data from the report:
This 16-page policy briefing from the BBC World Trust Service analyses the role of the media in the Kenyan [January 2008] post-election violence. It is designed to enable an understanding of what has happened in Kenya in the belief that these issues have important policy implications and consequences in many countries. It situates its analysis within debates on democratic governance and poverty in order to contribute to a process of extracting lessons from the crisis. The briefing examines political polarity in the media and its function as a political tool. It discusses the inciting of violence and the role of the local language or vernacular media, as well as the media's role in calming the violence. "The role of the media in Kenya's violence has ...raised questions of whether media can be too free in fragile states such as Kenya....[The] briefing argues that the role of the local language media during the crisis was the product of a chaotic regulatory policy and the lack of training - especially of talk show hosts, whose programmes provided the platform for most of the hate speech....It argues that many local language radio [stations] played a role in calming tensions as well as inflaming them, and could be a powerful mechanism for reconciliation."
Originally published on the PBS blog Mediashift.
Mobile phones are everywhere. They have long surpassed the Internet in number of users, and in some parts of the world, mobile phones now rival television in reach. The mobile tech economy (at least until recently) was booming with telcoms and handset manufacturers fiercely competing in emerging markets, and software giants like Microsoft and Google entering the mobile industry in earnest. There are now somewhere between 3.5 billion and 4 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, with the fastest growth happening in developing countries.
Al Jazeera launched a new site today for citizens in Gaza to report incidences of various kinds in Gaza via SMS and Twitter. The deployment is using Ushahidi and Souktel's SMS gateway, one of the few able to deliver SMS in Gaza. In this latest citizen journalism effort, Al Jazeera is both mapping reports from its own journalists and incidences reported by the public. So far, there are few citizens texting in, however; the majority of the content consists of Al Jazeera news reports for now. Al Jazeera and its new media team are doing a great job, however, in their labs -- very impressive innivations coming from the Arab satellite news service and its New Media folks like Ryaad M, for example.
I just came from the Global Forum for Media Development an Athens, Greece, where there is a lot of interest in how to use mobiles in media and journalism trainings, and in supporting citizen media efforts. I presented briefly our most recent work, A Mobile Voice, that describes how mobiles are used in citizen media. The dicsussions were lively and there were lots of ideas to take this work further. Specifically needed are journalism trainings and better toolkits and how-to materials that detail what tools and approaches work where. Security was also of great concern, and participants were eager to learn more about mobile security for media and activists. Athens is, of course, also experiencing social turmoil right now, so I engaged in a bit of citizen journalism on Twitter on my own, interviewing police and demonstrators during the night.
With the advent of ubiquitous mobile phones recording video, audio, and photos and easily connecting to a worldwide audience, everyone has the potential to become a citizen reporter on the spot, as news and events are happening. Traditional news organizations (aka mainstream media) are struggling to keep up and find relevance among the new voices from around the world. Al Jazeera, the Arab news company (and arguably not exactly mainstream media) has been testing mobile phones with its reporters and for its media coverage. Safdar Mustafa, head of Al Jazeera's mobile media unit, explains how in this coverage from MobileActive08.
More videos are on the MobileActive YouTube channel.
It's amazing working with a team of African student citizen journalists to document MobileActive '08. Students are from CSDF and Rhodes University and are from countries including South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia. Blogging of sessions was divided up according to a students' particular interest in gender or democracy or citizen journalism. They're certainly getting a lot of on-the-job training, and MobileActive is lucky to have their perception and insight.
For the last year there has been quite a bit of talk about mobile phone reporting in Africa. For good reason too, since this lowers the technology barrier to getting stories out of hard-to-reach places. Imagine, all you need to do is find a journalist and equip them with an adequate mobile phone Now you can record interviews in video and audio, take pictures and upload in almost any part of the continent.
Dr. Joel Selanikio believes in the value of the news. "It's one of my core beliefs that the more people know, the better decisions people are going to make," he said. Selanikio, the director of DataDyne.org, was recently awarded a Knight News Challenge grant for a project that distributes news on mobile phones.
Selanikio sat down with MobileActive for a discussion about his project. Selanikio isn't new to mobile phones. As director of DataDyne.org, he has used mobile phones for data collection with EpiSurveyor (read more about this in Wireless for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use.) He is also part of a consortium on mobile data collection, OpenROSA.
Jan. 17, 2008 from BBC.co.uk
If I had told you ten years ago that by the end of 2007 there would be an international network of wirelessly-connected computers throughout the developing world, you might well have said it wasn't possible.
I would probably have said the same, but as it turns out we would have been wrong: it was possible, and it was created, and it continues to expand, not through Non-Governmental Organisations or charity or development grants but through the market, with much of it financed by some of the poorest people on the planet.
I am talking, of course, about the mobile phone network.
Along with the internet, with which it is rapidly merging, this is the most astonishing technology story of our time, and one that has the power to revolutionise access to information across the developing world.
Unfortunately, rich country biases limit understanding of this amazing phenomenon: for those in North America or Western Europe the cell phone is primarily or uniquely a phone designed to make voice calls.
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