LONDON (AlertNet) - The growing army of "citizen journalists" operating in humanitarian crises who file news with great speed but often with no training present a headache for the aid community but also an opportunity to tell the story from a new angle and potentially save lives, aid workers and reporters said on Friday.
Social media like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook and the availability of cheap, hand-held technology means the pool of potential news reporters has exploded. But many of those filing from the frontline have no experience of reporting and organisation behind them to monitor their information for accuracy or ethics.
The phenomenon, seen during the Haiti earthquake in January, is stretching aid agencies, said the World Food Programme's Greg Barrow, a panelist at a WFP/AlertNet seminar on Hunger in the Media.
"The thing that really makes me wake up in a cold sweat at night is dealing with the army of citizen journalists who really are becoming increasingly empowered by technology, who come into it with very little background, who can pick up a camera, walk into any camp they want to with equipment they can carry in a small rucksack on their back and suddenly reach fairly substantial audiences, with what can be unsubstantiated information," Barrow told an audience of aid workers and humanitarian journalists.
Blogs and tweets reach a wide audience and come in at a rapid pace and aid workers face the challenge of knowing how or whether to follow them up immediately, of understanding whether they will balloon into a big news story or disappear off the radar, he added.
"We're facing a steep learning curve ... We need to work out how to attribute trustworthiness and reliability to different sources to deal with this emerging and growing area of citizen journalism," Barrow said. "ItÂ?s frustrating, it's very time consuming and sometimes you feel another thing is coming and stretching you in another area, but ... you canÂ?t just ignore it."
EXCITING DEVELOPMENT
Traditional media is increasingly broadcasting tweets and blogs from people on the ground, particularly in the early days of a tragedy, as international television networks take time to get into the disaster zone and set up.
Fellow panelist Shaheen Chugtai, humanitarian policy adviser at Oxfam GB, said the aid and development world had yet to understand fully the impact or potential impact of social media and Oxfam currently had a team looking into this.
"We're trying to understand its power, trying to understand the risks associated with it," he said, pointing out that a reputable aid agency would not want to respond immediately to news unless it was sure about the facts.
But new media was a "very important and very exciting development," he added.
AlertNet Editor Tim Large, also on the panel, said the Haiti crisis had shown the value of new media, both in terms of reporting news and through the use of mobile phone technology to help to get vital, potentially life-saving information via text messages to survivors.
"We saw this in Haiti and in other crises as well that this new media is bringing to light really interesting stories that traditional media is missing," he said. "There are dangers there, there aren't controls and it is in the hands of people who aren't trained as journalists so that's a problem, but it's an exciting development."
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