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An experienced radio journalist, having worked at Radio France Internationale for 20 years, Anne-Laure Marie decided to launch what she describes as "participatory online investigations" (or enquêtes participatives in French) using citizen contributions to look into technological issues in Africa. RFI, whose target audience is Francophone Africa, is widely respected as an independent source of news, and as well as the radio station, offers an extensive website. Marie has carried out three investigations so far, combining her professional journalistic experience with information from people in Africa who have the capability to offer first hand accounts of the situation. The Editors Weblog spoke to her to find out more about her investigations and how she is making professional-amateur journalism work.

How it started

Marie was given the task of working on interactivity of the website, but as most of RFI's audience is based in Africa, she was not sure how effective this would be due to people's difficulties in getting online. This concern itself gradually developed into the topic for her first project: why is the Internet so expensive in Africa? Using the l'Atelier des Médias community, which she described as a space in which people can "not only relate to journalists, but relate to each other," Marie sought contributions from people with first hand experience of this topic, asking questions such as how much people paid for an hour in an Internet café. She also contacted experts and found official figures.  L'Atelier des Médias has an hour and a half long radio show as well as its website, and its host Philippe Couve asks the community what questions they would like to ask guests on the show, and what subjects they would like to hear discussed. Collaboration between the two projects is working well, giving Marie a good base to work from and increasing the size of Couve's original community.

The benefits of participatory journalism

So far, Marie has carried out two further Africa-based projects, on the role of the mobile phone and on computers in classrooms. She is in the process of launching a fourth investigation, the subject of which she is letting her community choose. The advantages of seeking information from a community 'in the field' are numerous. For a start, it allows a journalist such as Marie to obtain contributions from many different countries, such as Benin, Cameroon, Senegal, Madagascar and the Congo: it would have been financially and practically impossible for one reporter to visit all of them in a short space of time. Looking at a range of countries allowed her to draw more general conclusions about the problems, and identify the causes more accurately. And as she said, her point of view would have always been that of a foreigner; "The people who live in the place always have another way of seeing the problem."

Marie explained that one of the most rewarding aspects of the investigations was coming across the unexpected: being prompted to pursue angles she had never considered. For example, one of the contributors to the first investigation accused her of being naïve for not realising that the problem was a north-south divide. Marie was not convinced by his argument, believing it to be too simple, but in following it up she realised that in fact it was largely true. "That is what's most interesting about carrying out this kind of journalism rather than working alone: it makes you think about different questions you wouldn't come across otherwise," she explained. She said that the way she works means that she has to trawl through a lot of material to find what is actually useful, and that it would probably be more efficient to ask people to contribute to specific points, but that then "all the surprise and the unexpected would be lost."

Participants

To participate, people must be a member of the community, and Marie stressed that it is very simple to sign up and takes less than five minutes. They must provide their name, location, job and phone number, so that can be contacted. They can then take part in any debate they want, or even start their own discussion. For the third investigation into the presence of computers in African classrooms, Marie received 244 responses from about 150 people. "There is a regular group who contribute frequently," Marie pointed out, and added that participants to the last investigation had said that they had located others in the community who worked in the same field.

Marie explained that in terms of participation, the projects have been working very well. She asks for documents and details as well as pure reports from her participants, and described how many people send very long contributions: because their time online is often limited, when they get connected they write as much as they can. One issue, however, is that because of people's limited contact with the Internet and even with phones, it is sometimes hard to reach people a second time to follow up on a contribution. From a journalistic point of view, Marie commented on how stimulating communication with the people is, and how much closer she feels to the people she is writing for and about than in previous projects. "It really creates trust between journalists and the people," she added, "and we create stronger bonds of citizenship."

Fact-checking

One of the major issues that arises with participatory or citizen journalism is how to verify that the information provided by the public is true, and this seems particularly pertinent when the participants are on a different continent. Checking every citizen's contribution would be a fairly daunting and possibly fruitless endeavour, and Marie relies instead on comparing information with that from specialists or officials, and with that of other participants. She asks a series of questions until she gets enough corroboration to ascertain that something is true. It is a tactic that works for this kind of in-depth investigative journalism carried out over a longer period (usually two months in this case) but not one which Marie thinks works well for breaking news, as there is just not time to present a full picture using citizen material. She also stressed that the value that citizens provide is their ability to witness, rather than their opinion on what is going on.

Moving into multimedia

Marie records some of the conversations she has with participants so that she can add some audio to the investigations. For the second investigation, on different uses of mobile phones, she started to make maps that showed the location of the participants, so that readers could click on a country, see who participated and listen to sections of interviews. "People liked it a lot," she commented, and added that she is very keen to make a "truly multimedia story with sound, pictures and video." The problems are that it is extremely time consuming, and she has learnt that it is difficult for people in African countries to get good quality pictures.



Funding

Carrying out these projects is extremely time-consuming, Marie explained, adding that she often produces about six articles over a two month period. For now, RFI are willingly funding her to start more investigations, but she does not know how long this will continue, and although she would like to see this sort of journalism grow, she is not sure whether it would be possible could find another media organisation who would be willing to pay journalists to do a similar thing in this economic climate. Investigative reporting is suffering at many traditional news outlets. Another option she mentioned would be to seek funding from NGOs or international organisations and investigate topics about which they wanted to know more.

Value of investigations, goals moving forward

The investigations are filling an important role in identifying and exploring some of the African continents technological obstacles: as Marie commented, she has "information you couldn't get another way." And some of the discoveries she has made have the potential to make a significant impact, if enough attention can be drawn to the subject. The investigations have revealed, for example, the extremely high costs that foreign telecoms providers such as France Telecom charge for Internet access in African countries, and the fact that there were new computers locked away unused in some African classrooms. The press response to the investigations has been positive, with a extract of the third report recently published in French paper Vendredi in its 'best of the Internet' section. NGOs have also been enthusiastic, Marie said, agreeing that the investigations were accurately portraying the situation in the field.

Marie's goal is to find a way to communicate with people who are not connected to the Internet, as evidently, it is a minority who have web access on a regular basis, as well as making the form of the reports more interesting with an increased multimedia focus. It is by no means 'popular' journalism; Marie herself admitted that many people outside the continent "just don't care" about Africa, but it is bringing attention to issues that matter and giving a voice to people who would be unlikely to have had such an opportunity otherwise.

It is the moment the media has been waiting for.  Newspapers around the US have learnt their lessons from election day and have been honing their strategy to make as much money as possible out of Obama's big day, printing extra copies, producing special supplements and hiking prices.  

Singapore newspaper The Straits Times (ST) revealed its print and digital makeover last Friday. The revamped print version features some changes in fonts and colors as well as an increased amount of top news on the front page. The redesigned website features a division of www.straitstimes.com into a paid service ST Digital and the free ST Breaking News.   

This week, the print edition will change the days that the sections "Digital Life", "Mind Your Body" and "Urban" are printed to Wednesday, Thursday and Friday respectively.

Like the US paper the Philadephia Inquirer, the ST is putting more focus on covering breaking news online. ST Breaking News will include breaking news coverage and news blogs, and the readers would have the ability to comment and interact with the reporters. The paid subscription service ST Digital will provide users with e-papers.

ST also announced the launch of the ST Razor TV, a free interactive online TV feature that offers live news programs, video on demand and a space for users to interact and communicate.

The paper plans to raise circulation until the end of August by providing 10,000 additional copies daily to unsubscribed households and coffeeshops.

Source: Publicitas

See also:
Singapore: The Straits Times should focus on "sponge" readers
US: Philadelphia Inquirer managng editor takes "backward" step?
US: Response to Philadelphia Inquirer's new online policy

More from the UK Guardian's Changing media Summit. User Generated Content (UGC), copyright and community engagement are the main discussion topics for this session.

The rise and prospects of hyperlocal journalism.

Citizen journalism media and local news websites offering user-generated content influence their communities and are here to stay, according to a report released by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. Traditional Media companies are coming up against these citizen journalism sites so it’s imperative to understand how to set them up, the secrets to success and how they can work hand in hand with newspapers.

The Financial Times is making its website FT.com free next week and launching a number of new initiatives in a bid to attract new readers. There will be new regular podcasts, including a daily podcast of the Lex column, and an arts podcast. Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin will be online on Wednesday doing a live Questions and Answers session about being an entrepreneur, and the future of mobile TV.

The 24-hour cable TV news station CNN has launched the next step in online video news called CNN Pipeline, "a premium on-demand broadband video service designed to enhance the way people view news by offering an extensive portfolio of online content and live video streams."