Some success stories on citizen journalism

Today we have had a guest lecturer in class, as Maggid Mjengwa, Tanzanian blogger and newspaper columnist, has been presenting to us his Mjengwa Blog, and explaining how he operates it, updating pictures and comments several times a day.

Maggid is a long-time friend of mine from Iringa, where he is coordinating the Tanzania programme of the Swedish NGO, Forum Syd. But he is also a journalist, writing weekly columns to the Raia Mwema newspaper and also publishing a local newspaper in Njombe district as well as an online publication called Kwanza Jamii. Nowadays it’s his blog however that he’s most known for among Tanzanians with an access to the internet. The Mjengwa Blog is one of the most famous and most visited blogs in Tanzania.

When Maggid launched his blog back in 2006, he was mostly publishing his own snapshots that he took about Tanzanians living their lives in the rural areas and cities. But as the readership has grown, today you’ll also find photos shared with other bloggers, pictures of news events and politicians, sports and celebrities. With some thousands of page views per day, Maggid’s blog now attracts adverts, and he also hires some people who assist him to run the blog.

Here are some pictures taken from the class today and posted in the Mjengwa Blog. The headline says “Journalists at training”, but as the first picture shows them during the lunch break, some readers were fast to send their comments asking whether the journalists were on a training course to learn how to eat :-D

During the last session today, I introduced to the participants some more websites, starting with Huffington Post, which was originally just a personal blog of the American journalist Arianna Huffington. In just a few years, Huffington Post has developed to become the third biggest online news publication in the world (right after BBC and CNN), with a huge following especially in the USA. Last year, the site was sold for 315 million dollars to the internet conglomerate AOL.

I also showed two blogs from Iraq which became famous during the war and the early years of the American occupation of the country. The blogs of Salaam Pax and a young Iraqi lady calling herself Riverbend gave readers around the world a direct taste of what life was in the country plagued with military raids, power cuts and water shortages, and local extremist militias taking control in the streets.

The neighbouring Kenya has also produced some great examples on how to use a blog for constructive and social purposes, or narrative creativity. Some of the most well-known Kenyan blogs since some years back haven’t however been updated for some time as many of the bloggers have moved on and climbed to other positions promoting the social media nationally or internationally. Here’s a piercing comment on that by Kenyan ex-blogger Potashius Nairobus.

Mzalendo, a Kenyan Parliament Watch, was a blog launched before the country’s elections in 2007 to report what the Kenyan MP’s were actually doing, and not doing. Readers were invited to share their contributions for publication.

Then, during the ethnic clashes following the Kenyan elections, the web service Ushahidi was introduced allowing people to send in alerts of unreported attacks and need for assistance. The site was simply using the Google Maps to visualize the killings in Western Kenya and Rift Valley. Later, the Ushahidi platform has been applied also for reporting crime in Atlanta or humanitarian needs after the earthquake in Haiti.

A new development in Kenya are the many blogs by young Kenyan women in their twenties. The same thing is actually happening in Finland as well, where some of the most popular blogs nowadays are fashion blogs hosted by young girls. The big difference is just that many of the blogs of the Kenyan ladies are really good, with well-written and amusing stories about anything from milkshakes to hard politics. I have provided links to some of these blogs on the right.

Just two examples how the established media elsewhere has reacted to the challenges of citizen journalism:

BBC was the first big news company to ask their readers to send in their photos for publication. That happened during the London Underground bombings in July 2005. The editors understood that the readers who happened to be at the place of the bombings and were carrying mobile phones with inbuilt cameras were the only potential source to provide pictures from the bombings.

The other example is more like a curiosity on how to attract the interest of younger readers who otherwise might shun away from the mainstream news coverage about political or economic or global topics. The American ICT magazine Wired produced an online game to explain the social and economic backgrounds of the piracy in the Indian Ocean waters outside the coast of Somalia. In the game, the player is running a Somali pirate operation, and really needs strategic thinking to be able to accomplish the mission with profitable results.