BBC Report on Arab Uprisings Calls for ‘Systematic’ Attribution for Citizen Footage
An internal BBC report on its coverage of the Arab uprisings this week revealed that three quarters of reports containing citizen media failed to inform the audience about the source of that media. The report, authored by Edward Mortimer for the BBC Trust, said that journalists should use caveats or disclaimers to warn the audience that this video content – often mobile phone footage – came from particular activists on the ground. This striking, perhaps even alarming figure suggests that in the vast majority of reports on the Arab uprisings,... Read The Rest →
Meedan partners with Syrian citizen news outlet Al-Ayyam
Meedan is working with the news newtork Al-Ayyam to bolster public voice, free expression and accountability in Syria. In a joint initiative that is designed to be responsive to critical and fast-changing needs on the ground, we seek to strengthen the role of citizen journalists to act together as a watchdog documenting the actions of the Syrian regime and armed groups operating in the country. Our objective is to provide a model for an investigative, citizen-led media in Syria and a building block of future reconciliation efforts. The partnership is... Read The Rest →
Six Steps for Fact Checking Citizen Media
Anyone can be a publisher today – thanks to the web. As a result, there are so many more sources of news and information, which makes fact checking all the more critical in fast moving news stories. When disinformation gets into the news cycle, it can lead to people being put in harm’s way. Here, then, is a set of six tips to help you get it right. 1. Who is the original source? Every piece of news has a source – the person who told you the news. Who... Read The Rest →
Meedan wins International Press Instiitute News Innovation Contest 2012
Meedan Checkdesk, a platform facilitating collaborative journalism for Middle East new media, has been named as one of 14 winners of the 2012 IPI News Innovation Contest. The award will support Meedan designers and developers to tackle one of the very thorniest problems of the social web: how news teams can better verify breaking stories from the Middle East using citizen reporting. We are honored to count IPI as a funding partner, putting us as it does in the company of some very high profile grantees, including AFP Foundation, Media... 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 →
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 →
How to Get Started with Your Cross-Language Conversation
We’ve produced some simple one-minute videos to explain how to get started on Meedan. Enjoy! On Meedan our community tracks and discusses major Middle East news stories by bringing together translated commentary and news from a wide range of Arabic and English sources. See how we do this in this video or at http://News.Meedan.net. Meedan is a cross-cultural forum for discussing the news across Arabic and English. On Meedan you can interact with people outside your language community by commenting on current events we’re discussing through our translation and dialogue... Read The Rest →
News.Meedan.Net Goes Live Feb 22, 2010
It has been a long time coming, but at 12:01 am PST on February 22, 2010 Meedan is peeking out from under the cover of our ‘beta’ status. As we transition out of beta we have decided to launch our media sharing site at news.meedan.net. We do so as a nod to Meedan’s larger strategy of increasing access to knowledge broadly for the Arab region through social translation and cross-language social knowledge solutions. As a site devoted to building community and technologies focused on increasing the amount of media and... Read The Rest →
Meedan launch at Aoc Forum in Istanbul
النشرة الإخبارية لشهر أبريل 2009 يبث موقع ميدان بيتا أخبار منتدى تحالف الحضارات CEO Note We are delighted to report a successful public launch of our dialogue platform, meedan.net. You can now register on our public beta to share conversation and media about world events with speakers outside your language community across Arabic and English – in our view a significant addition to the social web. This is a major milestone in our history, representing the culmination of months of painstaking work in design, development and preparation. We marked it... Read The Rest →