Meedan named as finalist in Africa News Innovation Challenge, in partnership with Al-Masry Al-Youm

It’s with great excitement that Meedan can announce that we are among the finalists in the prestigious Africa News Innovation Challenge, in partnership with Al-Masry Al-Youm for Checkdesk: A digital newsroom where journalists and citizens work together. To decide our fate in the competition, we’ll be heading to TechCamp in Zanzibar to be grilled about our ideas by global leaders in the fields of technology, innovation and journalism. We’re honoured to be given the opportunity to refine our ideas both with the expert judges and with our fellow finalists, and for... Read The Rest →

“Finding the Wisdom in the Crowd” and creating spaces for knowledge sharing

It’s an infrequent occurrence on the Meedan blog that we feel pushed to hit the “reblog” button, but sometimes important blog posts coincide with even more important breaking news events, and the time comes to reblog and remix. A few short weeks ago, Nieman Reports released their summer issue – essential reading for those of us pondering the increasingly overlapping worlds of social media and news reporting, and developing tools to help make sense of the social web. As a disjointed picture of events emerged yesterday from across Syria and journalists around... 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 →

Ramy Raoof trains Alexandria’s citizen journalists on verifying citizen media

This is a guest post for the Meedan blog, written by human rights activist and citizen journalist Ramy Raoof. Many thanks to Ramy and to Sa7afat Welad el-Balad for hosting the workshop. Yesterday I came back from Alexandria after spending two days in a workshop with an amazing group of young men and women. The workshop is one of a series of workshops organized by Meedan and Birmingham City University to enhance the skills of citizen journalists in generating content on and from online media and train them on verification... 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 →

Are you an innovator in citizen media? Win funding and support!

هل أنت مبتكر في مجال إعلام المواطن؟ اربح التمويل والدعم! If you’re as interested in improving access to media and helping drive social change as we are here at Meedan, here’s an opportunity that will be right up your street: إن كنت مهتماً بتحسين الوصول إلى الإعلام وبالمساعدة على دفع التغيير الإجتماعي إلى الأفضل مثلنا نحن في ميدان، فلديك فرصة مواتية ومناسبة تماماً: Ashoka Changemakers, with support from Google, has launched a global competition to discover ground-breaking solutions that boost media access and participation around the world. The competition is looking for... Read The Rest →

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