A few days ago, I had the opportunity to listen to Ethan Zuckerman speak during MIT’s Communications Forum, “What is Civic Media?” After the event, I spoke to Ethan Zuckerman about Global Voices Online, an organization that he co-founded with journalist Rebecca McKinnon through Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Global Voices Online (GVO) describes itself as “a non-profit global citizens’ media project” that “seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore.”
Zuckerman and I talked about the challenges currently facing journalism – and his decision to launch GVO. A journalist myself, I agree with Zuckerman that the developing world is largely ignored by the international press. This lack of information about large areas of the globe (shown here on another of Zuckerman’s projects, GAP) has grown more profound as the number of overseas bureaus has plummeted. The foreign news that is covered tends to be incomplete and biased. “There might be amazingly important things happening in Africa and we’d never find out about them.” Zuckerman, a self-described activist, blogger, and geek, believes the answer lies with bloggers.
GVO offers an interesting response to this growing inequality – working with the mainstream press to make it better.
The three-year-old organization aims to bring new voices to the mainstream press by compiling stories – blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, or videoblogs – onto a single site arranged by region or topic. In many ways, GVO resembles an old-fashioned newsroom. “We’re not shy about being a journalistic enterprise. It’s an edited project. We have a main stable of contributors.” The site is run by a managing editor who overseas a team of blogger-editors from around the world. The editors then pick and choose which blogs will appear on the GVO site.
This site’s top-down approach has not been particularly popular with some technologists. In fact, Zuckerman says GVO has gotten “a lot of crap from the web community. The newsroom model tends not to be well-received by Web 2.0.” GVO doesn’t use popular ranking tools like Digg and Reddit because Zuckerman believes such ratings systems tend to reinforce the biases of the voting public.
And it hasn’t necessarily found widespread appeal among the mainstream press yet. Issues of accuracy and fairness are at the core of mainstream media’s continued reluctance to using citizens to help cover the news. GVO’s largest sponsor is Reuters. Zuckerman draws a clear line between Reuters’ early news model that relied on stringers and freelancers to gather the news and their current interest in using edited aggregators like GVO to help cover world events. Still, he says he’s been amazed by how incredibly difficult it has been to even get Reuters journalists to look at GVO’s blog posts as a resource for their own stories. Zuckerman believes that this has something to do with “traditional newsgathering models (that) don’t think of blogs as a source for story ideas or contacts. Many (journalists) see blogs as trivial and biased.”
Some of this criticism is well founded. Bloggers tend to be activists. A blogger himself, Zuckerman revealed during our conversation, “the whole reason to blog is world domination.” Bloggers are also seldom representative of a community. In fact, Zuckerman concedes that this is a weakness of GVO – and blogging communities in general. “Bloggers are not representative of their countries. They tend to have a globalist bias.” These individuals, Zuckerman notes, tend to be part of the elite who have access to technology, often lived in multiple countries and blog in English to an equally cosmopolitan audience. An editorial team can mitigate these tendencies. “Bloggers leave a track record behind. You can go back and see whether this person has been around. You can see whether the community links to them and respects them.”
It might not be the most democratic approach, but by offering an edited list of blog posts, Zuckerman has adopted a very intelligent strategy for addressing some of the biggest problems surrounding citizen journalism and finding a way for citizen journalists’ messages to reach mainstream media.
And just to put this all in perspective, in many ways GVO’s biggest challenges aren’t the tensions between bloggers and the mainstream press. Translation and censorship issues preoccupy GVO. Because government intimidation or censorship is common in many developing countries, GVO works to keep its bloggers “on the air” by testing toolsets like Tor. Interestingly, because many bloggers must write “in code” to avoid censors, every posting on GVO is individually translated. [The site is currently available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Bangla.] During our conversation, Zuckerman said he only knew of Tunisia that had blocked the site. It’s an issue that is a constant concern. If the contributors are censored, Zuckerman says, “We’re screwed.”
Global Voices Online was the recipient of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation $10,000 Knight-Batten Innovations Award in 2006.