Syrian Media Activists Fill News Hole
Via AFP:
Journalists in Syria have been killed by snipers, accused of spying, and kidnapped by gunmen, and with the threats growing, many say the conflict is now too dangerous to cover.
The risks have increased the challenge of reporting from the country, which was already difficult because of violence, regime visa restrictions and propaganda on both sides.
Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says at least 25 professional journalists and 70 citizen journalists have been killed in the conflict.
But for many reporters, the bigger fear comes from abductions, which have been on the rise in the Syria conflict.
RSF says at least 16 foreign journalists are missing in Syria, although many cases have not been made public at the request of their families.
Filling the information vacuum, in part, are Syria’s media activists.
Via The New Republic:
On a mild morning in August, one of those journalists, a 26-year-old named Wassim, was dozing on the couch of the Syrian Media Center (SMC), an amateur operation headquartered above the local barbershop. Wassim—he asked that only his first name be used—grew up in Homs and has amber eyes and the lacquered hair of a pop singer.
For the past six months, Wassim had been sleeping in SMC’s offices, alongside Lulu, a long-haired white kitten. He typically awoke at noon, ate flatbread and cheese, smoked cigarettes, and waited for videos and photographs to come in from the SMC’s 100-odd informants scattered across Syria. Most of the clips, sent by an unpaid coalition of young male activists, depicted destruction: the bloody aftermath of regime artillery attacks on schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. Occasionally, there were shaky Handycam shots of running battles between opposition and regime forces.
From evening to dawn, Wassim edited the videos down to two or three minutes and posted them to the SMC page or its Arabic-language Twitter and Facebook feeds. If he was lucky, the BBC, Al Arabiya (a Saudi-based network), or Al Jazeera picked up the footage. But he was content to reach the many ordinary Syrians who visited the SMC page every day…
Verification of the media coming out of the country falls on newsrooms unable to get their own correspondents in. Some of it’s done through video and photo forensics. Other times it’s triangulating among trusted in-country sources to see if they can confirm an event actually happened (Andy Carvin’s excellent book, Distant Witness, about his Arab Spring coverage via social networks is a fascinating study on this).
And then there are startups like Storyful that are in the business of verifying media and information that comes across the social Web. It’s case study on validating Syria footage can be seen here.
Image: AFP reporter Sammy Ketz, taking cover from sniper in Maalula, Syria, by Anwar Amro/AFP.