Reports from the Frontline: How Small World News Trains Citizen Journalists and Captures Footage from Libya data sheet 2896 Views
Armed with a few Kodak Zi8 cameras, 6 HTC Wildfire mobile phones, energy, expertise in training citizen journalists, Small World News is working to share stories from Libya with the larger world.
Small World News is on the ground in Benghazi training Libyans to capture and tell video stories of events in this volatile region. Along the way, the team has also captured footage that no other main stream media outlet has been able to get. MobileActive.org chatted late last night with Brian Conley, founder of Small World News, to hear how things were going. What we learned is that capturing and sharing stories from Libya is as much about technology as it is about establishing trust and connections with the journalists on the ground.
Small World News and Alive.in
Small World News is a documentary and new media company that provides tools to journalists and citizens around the world to tell stories about their lives. We wrote about Small World News last when it helped an independent Afghan news agency integrate mobile phones and SMS into news reporting.
As part of its work in Libya, Small World News captures audio reports from individuals on the ground to broadcast to a larger international audience. It does this via Speak2Tweet, a collaborative project from Google, Twitter, and SayNow, which allows a caller to Tweet by calling a phone number and leaving a voicemail.
Today's news covers a new Android app development contest in Sub-Saharan Africa, Libya's rebel-created cell network, a look at how Android has become the fastest-growing mobile OS, a study on how mobile owners listen to music on mobile devices, and the growth of mobile Internet in South Africa.
Are you an app developer in Sub-Saharan Africa? Google has launched an Android Developer Contest – there are three competition regions (West and Central Africa, East Africa, and Southern Africa) and three categories (Entertainment/Media/Games, Social Networking/Communication, and Productivity/Tools/Lifestyle). Check out the competition's page to learn more – submissions open on June 1st and are due by July 1st.
After Libyan government forces disabled mobile and Internet services in March to cut off rebels' communication, a group of expatriates set up a new cell network outside of government control. Read the Wall Street Journal's in-depth coverage of the creation of the system here.
Recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have been on the minds -- and on the screens -- of people around the world.
News organizations are covering the events in innovative ways, and people have noticed. More generally, the role of social media itself in protests and revolutions is also being debated. But, as Charlie Beckett writes on his blog, let’s “put aside the silly debate about whether Twitter 'caused' revolution and look instead at how it helped tell the story.” Twitter is just one platform being used to help tell the story, as we see from our conversation with Al Jazeera, one of the most innovative newsrooms in the mix.
Armed with a few Kodak Zi8 cameras, 6 HTC Wildfire mobile phones, energy, expertise in training citizen journalists, 
