Checkdesk training begins in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon

We’re extremely excited to announce that our Checkdesk training programme is firmly underway in four countries across the Middle East. Led by our regional partners (Welad El Balad Media Services - Egypt, 7iber – Jordan, Ma’an – Palestine, Annahar & SMEX – Lebanon), and in close cooperation with our research and training partner Birmingham City University, the training program aims to develop citizens’ journalistic skills in the way they consume and analyze media, to nurture verification and fact-checking best practice, and to introduce trainees to the Checkdesk platform. Over the coming 6 weeks,... Read The Rest →

Okki Dokki – Checkdesk Partner Meeting Dokki, Cairo

Once again typing away from the regular environs of the winged metallic tube – to be exact, these words come to you from seat 31A here on the Lufthansa brand transport experience, headed westward, my home direction. The past two weeks have been very good for Meedan. Most significantly and to the point of this post, we held our first partners meeting for Phase 2 of the Checkdesk project. From October 16-18, we brought the entire Meedan team (less Aaron, Andy, and Zainab it must be noted) together with an... Read The Rest →

Meedan wins multi-year Arab Partnerships grant to support citizen journalists in Middle East

Hot on the heels of success in the IPI News Innovation Contest, Meedan has won a multi-year grant through the UK’s Arab Partnerships fund towards the development of a fact checking workbench and training program for citizen journalists in the Middle East. The funding will support Meedan’s development team to build on the success of the citizen-led liveblogging platform  it developed for Al-Masry Al-Youm, one of Egypt’s leading independent newspapers.   This platform supports the Al-Masry Al-Youm community to share and mark-up newsworthy content with the newspaper’s journalists, who can then quickly... Read The Rest →

Mansoura training workshop: On improving citizen media in Egypt’s governorates

This is a guest post on the Meedan blog by Nehal el-Sherif. How do you verify news on social networks? How do you build your network and provide accurate reporting? What makes a good photo? Last week, I went to the city of Mansoura to help 14 young Egyptians answer these questions and develop their analytical skills and sense of judgment in order to become better citizen journalists. The training in Mansoura was part of a series of workshops organized by Meedan and Birmingham City University to train citizen journalists... Read The Rest →

Ma’an News Agency to partner with Meedan on Middle East citizen journalism project

If you are following today’s Palestinian Land Day protests in the West Bank, an event which marks the 1976 killings of Arab demonstrators protesting Israel’s land appropriation, you may well be following the #LandDay hashtag on Twitter. “4 injuries in #IraqBorin near #Nablus .one of them is serious and one serious injury in #KuforQaddoum weekly demo #LandDay,” reports one user. But how do you sort the accurate and important reporting in this stream?  And how do you corroborate these reports with other citizen media on YouTube, Facebook and Flickr? As... Read The Rest →

Cairo journalist and Twitter supremo Lilian Wagdy trains budding citizen reporters at Tahrir Lounge

Last week I took part in the first of a series of workshops organized by Meedan and the Birmingham City University Centre for Media and Cultural Research that aim to train citizen journalists in verification techniques for  social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The ultimate goal of these workshops is to introduce trainees to a reporting platform developed by Meedan and adopted by one of Egypt’s best-known independent newspapers, Al-Masry Al-Youm.  The platform, http://liveblog.almasryalyoum.com, is designed to support citizen journalists to verify and disseminate important citizen reporting, and... Read The Rest →

Meedan releases update to participatory liveblogging service

Meedan has released a second iteration of its participatory reporting platform for Egyptian media partner, Al-Masry Al-Youm, as part of a multi-year project to support citizen journalism in the Middle East. The update further increases the visibility of citizen reporting in Al-Masry Al-Youm’s news output, and paves the way for the platform’s extension to five other Middle East media partners later this year as a collaborative verification workbench called CheckDesk. Its part of an effort to improve the use of citizen reporting in Middle East media. The platform enables citizens... Read The Rest →

Checkdesk: A new approach to fact-checking citizen media of the Arab Spring

The advent of new media has ended the scarcity in which mass media journalism functioned, with repercussions for both newsgathering and publishing. No longer are audiences solely reliant on foreign reporters to tell the story of Homs or Hama. No longer is news delivered solely to the tempo demanded by the evening newscast or first edition. At both ends of the news workflow, journalists are playing catch up, chasing the barrage of content being published on the web in a bid to keep ‘on top of the story’ and publishing... Read The Rest →

Citizen Liveblogging Egypt’s Phase 2 Elections

As part of our ongoing project supporting citizen news curation in the Middle East, we are today working with the awesome team at Egypt Independent to test our new citizen media liveblog. As Egypt goes to the polls in phase two if the first post-Mubarak parliament, we are posting citizen content to our citizen reports page for the journalists at Egypt Independent to use in their reporting. Posting a citizen report to the testing liveblog is wonderfully simple, and is something anyone can get involved with! All you have to... Read The Rest →

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