We’ve written before about mobile giving during disasters, and the dramatic results such campaigns can have. But mobile giving can be used for non disaster-related fundraising drives as well and This American Life, a show on the US public radio network, is one of the latest organizations to embrace this trend.
Have an opinion about what you’ve read in the news? Why not text the editor? While many news organizations use SMS to send out news alerts, The Namibian has set up “SMS Pages” in which readers send in text messages to the paper that are then published online and in the physical newspaper.
The Namibian, an independent daily newspaper with news stand sales of 27,000 a day (with an estimated 10-person pass-along rate) and a popular website edition, launched the SMS pages in August 2007.
There are two new projects in India that are taking advantage of the ubiquity of mobile phones and cheap voice calling there in order to get news to rural villagers. Widespread illiteracy makes newspapers and SMS alerts inadequate as news delivery systems, and irregular electricity makes television and radio unreliable. Voice calls are also very inexpensive in India, with per-second billing and a downward price-war among the main operators. Voice calls over mobile phones are an easy way for villagers to stay informed.
In the region of Uttar Pradesh, Gaon Ki Awaaz delivers twice-daily news updates via voice calls to villagers in their native Avhadi language. Launched in December 2009, the project now has 250 subscribers spread throughout 20 villages. Read our case study on the project here.
Further south, a similar project is operating among the members of the Adivassi tribe in India. Like Gaon Ki Awaaz, it allows villagers to share and receive news over their mobile phones in their native language (in this case, Gondi). Launched by Shubhranshu Choudhary of the International Center for Journalists, the project focuses on citizen reports with dozens of citizen journalists reporting throughout the region. Watch the video below to see how the project works. For more on audio services, see also our recent scan of projects and tools, Talk to Me: A Survey of Voice-Based Mobile Tech.
These two projects highlight the promise of the mobile phone for targeted news reporting; mobiles can provide cheap, reliable access to hyper-local news that may be more independent than government-controlled media. As mobiles become more common in rural areas, similar projects can provide a way to keep citizens connected.
Anne-Ryan Heatwole is a writer for MobileActive.org
Gaon Ki Awaaz: News Alerts for Rural Villagers data sheet 5559 Views
One call can bring news to hundreds in rural villages in India. Gaon Ki Awaaz, which means “Village Voice” in the Avhadi language, sends out twice-daily news calls to subscribers directly over their mobile phones. Launched in December 2009, the project recently expanded to 250 subscribers spread over 20 villages.
A video filmed on a mobile phone made history when it won the George Polk Award for Journalism this year. Not only was it the first video to win in the newly-created videography category, it was also the first video in the Polk's 61-year history awarded to an anonymous citizen journalist.
The video shows the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman shot and killed during the protests in June 2009 following the Iranian elections. After the release of the video, newsorganizationsaround the world took note. Hundreds of thousands of viewers have seen the video of the young woman's death and it galvanized protests around the world. The press release from the Polk Awards describes the video:
Note: This is the second of two articles about Mobile Voices, a project based in Southern California. The first post can be found here.
Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices is a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (ASC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA). Mobile Voices describes itself as "a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. [The project] helps people with limited computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere."
Note: This is the first of two articles about Mobile Voices, a project based in Southern California. The second article is here.
Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices is a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (ASC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA). Mobile Voices is "a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. Vozmob helps people with limited computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere."
Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles.
The foundation currently has programs in Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa, with plans to expand to more countries in 2010. The training program for the young journalists lasts nine months and teaches the trainees how to create video news reports with cell phones. At the beginning of the program, the small group (there are usually six or fewer participants per program) comes together and is trained for three to four days in the basics of mobile reporting (both how to use the technology and in basic journalism). Then they return to their communities, and for a period of six months, use the phones to make video reports on local stories.
Online computers, Africans do not have. Cellphones are a different story.
So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places - even in media dense environments.
Answers - and solutions - to this challenge were forthcoming in Grahamstown, South Africa, last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas - a Knight grantee - ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University.
South Africans use the word hectic to mean anything from cool, crazy, fun, to stressful. I mean hectic as the last sense of the word when I describe my efforts to accomplish a fairly simple goal in South Africa: set up a blog that I could update via SMS for a quick demo.
In the US
If I had tried to do this in the US, I would have had a myriad of possibilities, some good, and some bad. I will go through these possibilities to show the scope of what could be available in many countries, but isn't.
(This is part of a series of posts reporting on mobile media project from Highway Africa 2009 and Digital Citizen Indaba 4.0. Both were held in Grahamstown, South Africa, September 2009).
Brenda Burrell of Kubatana.net in Zimbabwe runs Freedom Fone, an audio tool for information services. She presented Freedom Fone in a workshop titled “Bringing down the barriers: Interactive audio programming and mobile phones” at Digital Citizen Indaba 4.0.
FreedomFone comes from the desire to deliver information to “those who need it most,” people with simple phones without GPRS connections. Freedom Fone integrates a content management system (such as Drupal) with information services via SMS and voice.
As I've mentioned, the Mobile Media Toolkit team will be attending the upcoming Highway Africa conference.
We are excited to meet up with Harry Dugmore and Guy Berger at Rhodes University who have been behind the Lindaba Ziyafika ("The News is Coming") project. The project, motivated by a desire to reach young people in Grahamstown, has taken Grahamstown's newspaper and enabled it for mobile-based citizen contributions.
The pre-cursors to mobile phones were walkie-talkies, and the first generation of mobile phone networks only supported voice communications. With second generation networks and a happy accident came SMS, and only with the third generation networks came mobile data services in the form of GPRS.
Most applications using mobile phones these days tend to use these newer channels of communication—SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a part of mobile phone communications. This article profiles interesting ways in which voice technology is being used for social work all around the world.
GroundReport.com is a platform for the kind of journalism that has many names: hyperlocal journalism, citizen journalism, wiki journalism. Rachel Sterne's idea is to have a website where anyone can just sign up and submit articles, and become an instant citizen reporter. Submitted content goes through a plagiarism filter and a group of editors will edit before any content goes live.
Based on the number of hits and the ranking of the author, good articles get filtered to the front page, and the hope is that bad articles will stay at bay with bad rankings and scarcely any hits. Contributors are compensated based on article rankings but compensation averages only a few cents.
As smartphones proliferate around the world, we ought to remain cognizant of what information we share on those phones with applications, application developers, advertisers and marketers. Phones are incredibly personal, always on, and always with most of us. As a result, they can reveal sensitive information. In fact, it is time for smartphone users to put pressure on application developers, platform providers, and eventually legislators to protect private and potentially sensitive information.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently published a paper on locational privacy. Because smartphones know where we are (using GPS, and if not, using applications such as Google’s My Location service), they can reveal a lot of information about activities, patterns of behaviour, and relationships we have.
Af the Afghani elections are coming up this week, there are a projects focusing on the election and citizen media coverage that we like to note.
First, as Taliban has intensified violence and has threatened to disrupt the elections and "kill those who vote," the Afghani government has called for reporters to avoid coverage of violence so that Afghanis aren't scared away from polling stations. Meanwhile, associations such as the Independent Journalist Association of Afghanistan have refused to take the order and has promised to continue reporting. The ban on reporting is phrased as a "request" in English, and as "strictly forbidden" in Dari (good synopsis of ban and violence here).
As we explore the role of mobile media for the Mobile Media Toolkit project, we are delighted at the coverage on National Public Radio's mobile section on its "Inside NPR" blog. NPR, a public radio conglomerate in the United States, has made some forays into the mobile world, mostly with its applications on smartphones.
As Afghanistan's second democratic elections nears on August 20th, journalists are gearing up for fair and accurate reporting. The NGO Nai and the media development organization Internews have trained journalists and civil society workers over the past few months in fair and accurate reporting. Training includes, according to Internews, "active learning practices, the understanding of regulatory information on all aspects of the elections, and the importance of fair reportage."
Panos Institute West Africa released a report in October 2008 exploring the connectivity of West African Radio Stations to the Internet, and their use of other information and communication technology including integration with mobile. The report presents results of a survey that was conducted in 220 radio stations in Ghana, Benin, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
Radio, which "remains the most appropriate communication medium for social and development communication in Africa", does not have great online presence, but has higher use of mobile phone technology. The results vary drastically with type of radio station and the country it is operating in.
