Twitter and Iran/Disasters and the Media

Interesting piece on the Guardian today saying that Twitter's role in the Iranian protests was overhyped...

Also I've got caught up in a debate on disasters and the media on the ALNAP forums...

Woo hoo!

My piece on the blurring of NGOs and news organisations has just gone online at the Nieman Journalism Lab. What a great end to 2009 - and in a week where all my pre-Christmas planning has gone completely awry, a great break....

The Nieman Journalism Lab, a project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard is running a series on NGOs and the news at the moment so there's plenty of stuff to read there at the moment (and should speed up my next research considerably :)

Totally chuffed.

Dispatches from Disaster Zones

I spoke on a panel at the Red Cross's Dispatches from Disaster Zones symposium earlier this week - Charlie Beckett's account here. Our panel was particularly lively thanks to provocative statements from Sam Kiley who wrote the following piece Do starving Africans a favour - don't feed them. He got into a debate with the DEC's Brendan Parry about whether NGOs had been misusing the word famine...it all got rather hot under the collar. Thoroughly good fun.

Meanwhile the Guardian has a really interesting piece here about how Africa is leading the west in terms of mobile phone journalism....

Advent resolution

After a bit of a break from blogging due to various life situations getting in the way, I'm hoping to start blogging again on the subject of new media, aid agencies and the like. First a very interesting piece by Charlie Beckett about MSF and multimedia work in the DRC here.

Second - from a month ago there is the special that I contributed to on Al Jazeera English on 25 years since Ethiopia. Great quote from Michael Buerk on why he didn't interview any of those who had come to Korem because they were starving - shows how much times have changed. So for those who inevitably think journalism has got worse, think again. Part one here, and part two (including Buerk) here.

Holding the aid agencies accountable

Interesting to see that Peter Gill is writing a book on famine reporting 25 years on from the Korem reports. He has done a piece for Media Guardian today reflecting on this - found here. The Dimbleby quote - how many skeletons - is all too believable (although the intro about Michael Buerk made me inadvertently laugh which I don't think was either Gill or Buerk's intention).

Gill puts his finger on it. The IBT's view that we should refuse negative images has its limitations. What is really needed is an examination of what aid agencies have done over the past quarter century. NGOs frequently complain they get a hard time in the media; I would disagree. Frequently they are not examined closely enough at all....

Distraction - or the future?

Most journalists see user-generated content as a distraction from their real job according to a paper given at the Future of Journalism conference......

Certainly I think Claire Wardle is right that attitudes at the BBC have changed a lot - even from 2007 when the survey was carried out. When I last visited the UGC hub there there was a definite pro-active attitude and eagerness to embrace Twitter, Flickr et al.

Blurring the lines

Good report in the Times yesterday about Lord May attacking the BBC's decision to drop Planet Relief Day. Although this is about global warming, the issue raised (and the reason why the BBC dropped the idea) is ongoing worries about impartiality - although it's only fair to say the BBC denies this in their response to the Times. Certainly however there has been ongoing criticism from certain sections about the BBC getting involved in big issues like this....and this is the result.