Global Voices Summit: Online Crisis Reporting

Many of the panels at the Global Voices summit offer a global perspective on difficult reporting challenges. “When the Stakes Are High and the Story Ever Changing: Online Crisis Reporting” Moderator Lauren Finch explains that these look like simple stories to handle: they erupt, a professional or citizen reporter offers their take, and we repeat as necessary. But that’s becoming harder and harder.

Governments routinely go into propaganda overdrive, and we need to unpack what’s real, what’s imagined and aspirational. A flood of citizen generated media means we can illustrate a crisis more thoroughly, but it also means we have an ongoing challenge to verify. People in a crisis are often going through trauma, which demands compassion and caution in coverage. And all these factors take place under an intense time crunch. Our panel features professional and citizen journalists who’ve taken on crisis reporting around the globe.

Mohamed Nanabhay, former head of online at Al Jazeera English and Global Voices board member, remembers the Egyptian revolution as an event that taught him lessons about crisis reporting. On January 25, 2011, Al Jazeera was ready to roll out a massive story: The Palestine Papers, a massive document leak that offered an inside look into the Israel/Palestine negotiations. Al Jazeera had spent months on the story, producing documentaries, online features and the whole organization was ready to break the story.

In this case, Jazeera had lousy timing. Their stringer in Cairo let them know that protests were taking place in Tahrir Square, but the newsroom dismissed the reports: there’s always a protest in Egypt. Al Jazeera is not exactly short on Egypt experts, but they were initially blind to the significance of the protest. For Mohamed, he began to understand what Jazeera needed to do by monitoring Twitter. People on Twitter were taking the revolution very seriously, connecting it to the revolution in Tunisia, and wondering why Jazeera wasn’t reporting it, speculating a Doha-based conspiracy to support Mubarak.

Al Jazeera had one small story about the protest and was working to direct web viewers to the Palestine Papers story, but that little story was getting massive attention. So the newsroom, led by Twitter and by activists demanding coverage, directed by their traffic statistics, decided to deploy multiple journalists and take on the story in a serious way.

Isolde Amante is a print reporter based in Cebu. In the 23 years she’s worked, last year featured a stretch of 23 days that were more challenging than any others she’d ever experienced. On October 15, 2013, a magnitude 7.2 quake struck in Bohol, killing over 200 people. On November 5, 2013, a tornado destroyed 70 houses. And on November 8, 2013, Typhoon Haiyan impacted near Cebu. It was the worst storm ever to hit the Philippines and killed 6300.

Given the other big stories, Amante says that her paper had fewer than 5 reporters available to cover the story. They disabled their beat system and simply covered whatever they could as fast and as properly as they could.

Haiyan is not the only typhoon to have struck Cebu – locals remember Typhoon Mike from 1990. But in comparison with past crises, social media transformed how journalists covered this typhoon. When the tornado broke a few days earlier, her newsroom heard about it not via radio, but via Twitter. Someone tweeted a report and a photo directly to the newspaper.

Social media has also made it possible to cover ongoing efforts to rebuild from the typhoon. When CNN and the BBC stopped reporting on the crisis, the Cebu papers continued, featuring stories on survivors and rebuilding, often using data delivered to them online.

News organizations are also able to be more proactive in the days of digital media. Weather information in the Philippines tends to be limited to storms within the nation’s borders. Cebu newspapers now rely on Japanese weather info and on the twitter streams of meteorologists who warn of typhoons reaching the island.

The demand for information has also become more urgent as the audience for news is changing. There are 10 million Filipinos based abroad who wanted to know what was going on in the wake of the typhoon. As a result, the most popular feature on the Cebu Sun Star’s website was a list of the missing. News organizations now see themselves serving both local and global audiences simultaneously.

Finally, social media has helped mobilize community support. Amante notes that 56% of post-typhoon aid came from the local private sector, while only 8% came from local governments. The newspapers did their part, printing lists of rural communities that had not received aid, repeating until those communities got their fair share.

She notes that the Philippines seems to be getting better at crisis response. Typhoon Hagupit was a stronger storm than Haiyan, but there were fewer casualties. “Maybe we’re making progress.”

Joey Ayoub writes about Palestine and about Lebanon. He notes he’s wearing a Palestinian keffiyah given to him from a friend from Haifa, halfway between Beruit, where he lives, and Gaza, which he often covers.

In the last Gaza conflict, over the course of 50 days, over 2000 Palestinians were killed. 78% were civilians. Joey notes that 77 families were wiped out entirely. Gaza is a very small territory, extremely poor and 45% of the population is less than 14 years old. A six year old Gazan, he explains, has experienced three major wars, or using the term he prefers, massacres.

Despite the fact that Gaza is closed, it’s easy to cover via social media. “Gazans tweet in English because they know that the only thing that can stop this hell is the West.” He features some of the tweets from Gaza that helped illustrate the most recent war, pointing to Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor who lives and works in Gaza. 13 of 16 Gazan hospitals were destroyed in the war, which meant that children needed to be taken to Egypt for emergency surgeries. Joey shows a picture of a child’s passport photo. The child is wearing a oxygen mask as the passport was an emergency one and the photo was taken of the child in the hospital.

Social media also allows for counternarratives. Ben Cohen, an online activist, posted a tweet that went viral, a photo of himself with Gazan children. It had the ironic title: “Selfie with greatest threat to Israel”. When the Times of Israel republished an oped from an American newspaper titled “When Genocide is Permissible”, online activists demanded its takedown, and documented its presence on this major Israeli news site before it was removed.

Chloe Lai is a long-time Hong Kong journalist, who after 15 years with commercial papers is now running a small website, an online magazine promoting sustainable development. She also writes for InMediaHK, which she describes as working a similar model to Global Voices, using citizen voices to document current events.

She suggests that Occupy Central in Hong Kong should challenge the narrative of Hong Kong media as open and free. Apple Daily, the sole pro-democracy newspaper, has been firebombed twice, once at their offices, once at the publisher’s home. The paper’s printing plant was surrounded by pro-China protesters to prevent the paper from distributing their papers. Online attacks rendered the paper’s website inaccessible, so for a short period of time, Apple Daily was only able to distribute news via Facebook and other social media.

Direct attempts to intimidate journalists are complemented by incidents of self-censorship. Lai shows us a video of a protester being carried off by police officers into a dark corner, then kicked and beaten by six police officers. It was shot at 3am during a night of the protests, and aired at 6am on Hong Kong’s most popular TV station with a voiceover explaining the context for the video. The head of the newsroom called the office at 6:35am and demanded that the newsroom edit it to remove the voice over.

The video, with voiceover, went viral, and reporters wrote an open letter to the newsroom chief protesting the decision. All the people who wrote the letter were brough to a meeting where the newsroom chief justified his decision, explaining “You are not the worm in the police officer’s body – how can you be sure what happened?” He ordered the newsroom to stop talking about a “dark corner” where the incident took place and demanded that they allow the audience to form their own opinions.

A reporter recorded the meeting, shared it and it, too went viral. Even when mainstream press are self censoring, social media channels are making it harder for stories to be silenced.