On the Meedan Radar – February 2013

Journalism & Tech - Blog by general manager of French newspaper Les Echos on the need for a Digital “New Journalism” – interesting insight into how he views audience source awareness and trust: http://www.mondaynote.com/2013/02/17/the-need-for-a-digital-new-journalism/ - One to watch out for here, with a new series of posts by the team at Witness + special guests (Andy Carvin, Liam Stack etc) on citizen video for journalists http://blog.witness.org/2013/02/citizen-video-for-journalists-1/ - Twitter Devolutions – post by Marc Lynch assessing whether social media was doing harm to the Arab Spring http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/07/twitter_devolutions_arab_spring_social_media There’s also an interesting... Read The Rest →

Meedan at #4MCairo conference, talking about Checkdesk and participatory journalism

Meedani Dina Hawary will today be at CFI’s 4M conference in Cairo to discuss the intersection of new media and journalism, in particular to present the work we’re doing on Checkdesk and approaches to participatory journalism. Below are the slides for Dina’s presentation, and the livestream (in Arabic) for those who want to follow. تْشِك دِسْك – الإعلام الاجتماعي إلى غرف الأخبار from Tom Trewinnard [View the story "4M Cairo 2013 - Day 1 | Journalism and new media : new working experiences, new tools, new ways of organizing" on... 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 →

Checkdesk: how can newsrooms get closer to the truth, faster?

Meedan Director of Design Chris Blow reports from Zanzibar Last week, we were at the Africa News Innovation Challenge’s #TechCamp Zanzibar conference describing our latest project, Checkdesk, a tool for newsrooms. Checkdesk is designed for three activities: 1) collaborative bookmarking to bring media into the newsroom; 2) collaborative fact-checking that builds a relationship with readers; and 3) liveblogging which contextualises social media rapidly changing situations. Our question is: how can newsrooms get closer to the truth, faster? Our goal is to improve the relationship between journalists and readers and ultimately... 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 →

Are you following the Arab spring through social media? Share your experiences

How can we better assess the credibility of citizen news reports online? What tools would help us to cross-reference and investigate citizen content? As part of a multi-year project with partners in Egypt and the United States, Meedan is supporting journalists to sort citizen media for credibility and accuracy. Here we ask you to help us understand the features we need to make this possible. Please fill in this 4-minute questionnaire, and if you want us to follow up with you for an interview, please give us a shout on... Read The Rest →

Meedan wins multi-year grant to support citizen news curation in Middle East

Meedan has won a multi-year grant to support an innovative news project in the Arab world that will help put Middle East citizens in the driving seat of news gathering. The grant was awarded by the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) under its freedom of expression and democratization program. It will support Meedan to begin prototyping a news platform for citizen media curation in Arabic and English in collaboration with regional media partners. A leading daily newspaper in Egypt has agreed to take part in the first year, to be... Read The Rest →

« Older Entries

Meedan Blog