My dream activist-journalist website

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Julia

With the shift toward “view from somewhere” journalism, we are probably going to see more activist-style stories permeate the news pages. So how do you engage readers who might want to do something about what they are reading?

Rather than designing a widget, I think the way to get readers talking and acting is to simply do a better job of helping them find content they might be interested in and that might provide ammunition for causes they already hold dear.

As we discussed in early classes, the media do a poor job of matching readers with content. In my experience, beyond simple algorithms at the news sites I wrote for, it was typically up to me and online editors to identify communities that would be interested in a new story and target them by emailing a link, tweeting at them with appropriate hashtags, or encouraging sources to share the story. This was time consuming and we weren’t always aware of the key players and interest groups on the subject—especially globally—or we didn’t have time to find their contact information.

This assignment made me wonder whether there is a systematic way to match journalists who write about particular causes to appropriate online communities, newsletters, interest groups, policymakers, discussion boards, Facebook pages, et cetera, so that they can better target their stories and mobilize people for action.

For example, I imagine a website for journalists that allows them to search key words related to a story, perhaps narrowing by geographic region. Let’s say I am writing about the need for transparency in clinical trials. I enter the words “transparency” and “clinical trials” and the website spits out contacts and Twitter handles for advocates of the AllTrials campaign, other journalists, health professionals, politicians, researchers, and activists who already write or talk about clinical trials transparency, and Facebook or other social pages related to the issue. It would be even better if the journalist could enter the entire text of her story, and the website could return all the appropriate related social content and contact information (ie., Twitter handles, Facebook pages, hashtags, etc.) so that the journalist could save time searching. I think this kind of resource would help journalists and editors better match their content with eager readers who are likely to care about and act upon a given story.

news2action — a rough prototype

Posted on April 9, 2014 by William

I learned a little Javascript and made a slider of possible actions. Here’s the demo.

Spanish authorities lie about immigrant tragedy

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Caty

Background

Spain has two enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla, and migrants from all over Africa regularly try to reach them, mostly by climbing the border fence that separate them from Morocco.

The border fence consists of 6.8 miles of parallel 10 feet high fences with razor-wire, regular watch posts, CCTV, spotlights, noise and movement sensors, and a road running between them for police patrols. Deaths and injuries are common and have increased since razor wire was installed.

There are more migrants now who attempt to reach a seawall that separates the Spanish territory from Morocco, as seen in this map published by El Pais:

The seawall that separates the Spanish territory from Morocco. An info graph from elpais.com

The news

On February 6 fifteen immigrants died off the coast while trying to swim around the seawall to reach the Spanish enclave. Spanish Civil Guard, who was alerted by Moroccan security forces that the migrants were approaching, didn’t admit any responsibility in the tragedy.

Migrants who survived accused the Civil Guard of firing their weapons at them while they were in the water, rubber bullets included, which caused the panic that resulted in the tragedy. Head of Civil Guard and Spanish Government denied it and lied about the circumstances surrounding the tragedy.

Some reactions

1. NGOs released videos, pictures and interviews with surviving migrants showing that panic set in as Civil Guards began firing tear gas and rubber bullets at those attempting to swim. [Examinations by the Northern Observatory for Human Rights on some of those who died confirm that some had marks indicating they had been shot by rubber bullets. The observatory also stated that the Civil Guards did not assist the migrants or alert the rescue coastguards].

One of the survivors shows wounds caused by rubber bullet. Image was distributed by Caminando Fronteras NGO

2. European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström immediately said on twitter that European Commissions wanted an explanation about why police fired rubber bullets in warning.

She got tons of replies, mainly from Spanish people, saying things like these:

EU has asked Spain for an independent investigation.

3. People organized themselves online and protests took place in 15 Spanish cities to condemn the death of the migrants. Placards proclaimed, “They didn’t drown, they were murdered,” “Natives or foreigners, we’re all the same”, “No one is illegal,” and “Where are the pro-lifers now?” (In reference to those who support the new restrictive Abortion Law being prepared by the Spanish government run by the Conservative Party).

Madrid protest. a picture of Jairo Vargas for Publico.com

4. Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz was forced to appear at the Parliament. He acknowledged that Civil Guard officers fired their anti-riot weapons, contradicting an earlier version.

5. Almost 200.000 people have signed a petition demanding the minister resignation because of the tragedy and manipulation carried out by state forces to cover his speech.

Syrian families are running out of food

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Elissar

The issue

The United Nations announced yesterday it will have to cut down on food aid to Syrian families in need because of a lack and delay of funding from donor countries. It is estimated that half of the Syrian population currently needs humanitarian aid for survival and that 6 million persons are internally displaced.

Last January 15, relief agencies organized a second “Pledging Conference” under the auspices of the UN to rally financial support for the worsening humanitarian crisis in Syria. The donor countries initially pledged US$ 2.3 billion at the conference which took place in Kuwait, however, UN officials claim that they have received only 1.1 billion so far.

As a result, the standard food basket for a family of five, which is composed of rice, bulgar wheat, sugar, salt and wheat flour, has now been cut by 20 percent in March, according to officials from the World Food Programme (WFP).

UNHCR also claims that it has experienced delays in donor pledges to Syrian refugees residing in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. The agency expressed concerns over worsening economic and security conditions in many refugee camps.

Why should you care? Or more practically, how does this affect you?

Aside from the obvious ethical reasons, many ordinary Syrian citizens might die of hunger – especially when war, conflict, and political violence traps innocent bystanders and strips them of their livelihoods. So, maybe we could all gain to help the hungry and the helpless – whether they are in our immediate circle or not – and make the world a better place (a somewhat better place).

The more civilians suffer from conflict, the more likely they are to turn to violence as a survival strategy. It’s no secret that economic hardships, unemployment, and deprivation breeds violence and instability (and turns ordinary individuals into terrorists or extremists). The more innocent Syrians suffer, in and outside of Syria, the more likely the conflict will endure and radicalize the rest of the region. Accordingly, neighbouring countries such as Lebanon and Turkey have already witnessed spillover effects from the civil war in Syria. The international community does not stand to benefit from an increasing volatile and turbulent Middle East, which may – or may not – develop hostile attitudes towards the US, Russia and the European Union.

The increasing economic pressures on Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries, as illustrated by the head of UNHCR, pushes refugees to flee to developed countries in search of better opportunities. Sweden, the U.K., Norway and other European countries have already received waves of resettlement requests from Syrian nationals. If these requests are accepted, it will add further economic pressure on European economies.

What you can do

Donate! So you make sure that the funds get directly distributed to the beneficiaries. You can either make a monthly or a single contribution to UNHCR or the WFP. Your contributions will provide a number of Syrian families with drinking water, vaccinations and tents.
Click here to donate to UNCHR and here to help the WFP.

OR you could:

Send a letter to your country’s delegation at the UN to comply with their pledges. The main donor countries are: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.K., the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, France and Canada. Click here to find out whether your country took part in the 2014 pledge for humanitarian assistance in Syria.

Mourning Anja

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Ravi

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An Afghan police commander opened fire Friday on two Associated Press journalists, killing Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Anja Niedringhaus and wounding veteran correspondent Kathy Gannon — the first known case of a security insider attacking journalists in Afghanistan.

Anja Niedringhaus in 2003.

Anja was a brilliant, sensitive courageous photographer who died photographing hope amid conflict, which she was an expert at.

The point for Anja was that she loved showing, through her photos, the humanity of people in even the most foreign and distressed situations. Fans of her photos can send messages of condolence to her family, they can post their prayers on stories of mourning.

They can make also donations to charities, such as MSF, which help the most vulnerable, the people Anja tried to bring to life in her photos.

But, in the end, it is the work that is her lasting legacy.

So click here and here

and here

In this photo taken by Niedringhaus yesterday, an Afghan girl helps her brother down from a security barrier set up outside the Independent Election Commission and definitely here

to see the vital images that Anja risked her life to make over the past decade. Mourn her by making her work worthwhile, by seeing it, feeling it, expanding its reach.

Story of ‘Sweetie’ continues

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Nini

THE challenge is to provide children like “Sweetie” with a normal childhood and a safe environment so they may grow to pursue their dreams.

Webcam child sex tourism emerged last year as a new way of abusing the Internet after a Netherlands organization discovered this phenomenon with the use of a computer-generated 10-year-old Filipino girl named “Sweetie” to track predators online.

“Sweetie,” the virtual 10-year-old Filipino girl created by a Dutch charity to expose the problem of webcam child sex tourism.

After the “Sweetie” project, the Terre Des Hommes Netherlands, a child protection agency, identified more than a thousand pedophiles from over 70 countries and turned over the information to international law enforcement agencies.

The group discovered how Filipino children are denied their childhood and forced into sexual activities, at times with the prodding of relatives. These children are told this is safe as no touching is involved in webcam child sex tourism and this is a quick way to earn for the family. Most of the clients in webcam child sex tourism are people in first world countries.

Five months after the group’s disclosure of its findings in November last year, there has been no update on the status of charges filed against online predators and policy decisions made to strengthen laws protecting children.

The Terre Des Hommes Netherlands asked people to sign an online petition for an international crackdown on webcam child sex tourism. The petition said such crackdown will “require announcing a plan for intercepting potential predators in public chat rooms, initiating prosecutions and challenging intermediaries who enable and profit from this vile trade.”

More than this petition, there are other actions that can be taken online and offline to put a stop to webcam child exploitation. They are:

1) Keep the story going. Continue the monitoring of arrests of predators and raids on Philippine houses that have become havens for these illegal sexual activities.
– Google map to plot raids and arrests made in Philippines communities
– IFTTT recipe to capture all news related to webcam child sex tourism in the Philippines (supply side) and abroad (demand side) and add the data to a Google spreadsheet
– Article on how communities are able to address this problem

2) Provide stiffer penalty or consider as an aggravating circumstance the use of the Internet or webcam in the crime of child exploitation or when a family member is involved in pushing a child to have online sex.

3) Invite Anonymous or set up a hackathon to create a program to catch online predators.

Free AJ Staff

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Jude

Just 100 days ago, Peter Greste and his Al Jazeera journalist colleagues were arrested in Egypt. They have now just clocked 100 days in jail defending their right to freedom of expression. The charges leveled against them by the Egyptian government are false. From accusations of being terrorist to claims that their news coverage is a threat to the nations internal security. They have been charged with falsifying news and portraying a bad picture of the country. This is indeed ludicrous. Accusations to the effect that Peter has vehemently denied that he is associated with the Muslim brotherhood. At a recent hearing on March 5, he said that the allegations of his association with the Muslim brotherhood are indeed preposterous.

Several efforts to have them released by the international community have not been successful. The United Nations Commission on Human rights has urged the authorities to promptly release the journalists being held in custody but as we speak today, they are still languishing in jail.

There is need as members of the fourth estate and the general public to put pressure to get them released. Next it could be a your local journalist. Egyptian authorities are known for infringing on the rights of journalists. Several other journalists have been arrested and are still in captivity. The case of Peter Greste is not isolated. As stated by Edmund Burke, “Evil prevails when good men do nothing.” We as a people can not sit back and watch an act of travesty go on under our very own eyes. He is what you can do to help.

Sign the petition here. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/583/945/591/freeajstaff-release-detained-al-jazeera-journalists/

Alternatively, make a daily tweet using the hashtag #FreeAJStaff. The following are examples of such tweets. Feel free and be creative!

Journalism is not a crime. In support of @PeterGreste and colleagues. #freejournalism #FreeAJStaff pic.twitter.com/XOhCHuFHwZ

— BBC Trending (@BBCtrending) April 7, 2014

Media and Civic Participation assignment

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Mine

Defending Free Journalism and Free Information

Against Corporate and State Control

Media and journalism scholars have been addressing critical issues and underlining the importance of free journalism and free information through disseminating research findings and using classroom education as a tool of critical pedagody praxis. This year, we witnessed that they also formed a petition as an outcome of research conference titled Freedom of Information Under Pressure. Control – Crisis – Culture which was held in Vienna. The participants of the conference are not limited with academics and researchers, but also include media practitioners, activists, librarians, lawyers and policy makers.

Even though the conference presenters were mainly from Europe, the scope of the conference and the final petition are beyond Europe. In fact, the main focus of the conference was the challenge of freedom of information, and was related with the recent surveillance revelations and the following control of journalists and whistle-blowers in Europe and beyond.

The conference theme announces that:

We consider Edward Snowden’s revelations as a wake up call. His story is not about one man leaking classified information; rather it is about privacy, civil liberties, power and democracy. But also about the future of the Internet itself, the nature of democratic oversight – and much more.

We condemn the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex, in which the American, British and other European states’ intelligence services conduct mass surveillance of the Internet, social media, mobile and landline telephones, in co-operation with communications corporations such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Skype, Yahoo!, Aol as well as private security firms.

We express our solidarity and support to whistle-blowers, journalists and organisations, including Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian and others, for their efforts towards fostering transparency and public accountability. We denounce their oppression and prosecution that we consider as a major threat to freedom of information.

Here is the petition open to sign. The participants of the Future of News and Participatory Media are invited to sign the petition and inform the people about the petition:

We call for media reforms and a deeper and more sustained public discourse that equip critical, alternative, independent and public service media with adequate resources, help establishing a resource-base for alternative Internet, social media, software and open access projects, and limit the dominance of advertising culture in the media and on the Internet. We also call for legal and safety protections for news journalists, mechanisms that protect users from the commodification of personal data, and put in place effective measures to safeguard free and independent media as well as journalists’ and citizens’ physical safety against violence and harassment.

Women2Drive Campaign on Twitter

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Dalia

Back in October of last year, I had scraped about 6,000 tweets that contained the hashtag #Women2Drive. The hashtag was dedicated to the campaign to pressure the Saudi government to overturn the ban on women’s right to drive. Although, the campaign did not succeed in changing the law, it did garner international attention on the issue. There were reports on Saudi women defying the ban, but the main story that ignited on Social Media was the Youtube Video and song that was released by Saudi artist entitled “No Woman, No Drive”that was in support of overturning the ban.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZMbTFNp4wI

For this assignment I decided to take a hack at the data and see what story comes out of it. The data itself contains: the unique ID for each tweet, tweet URL, text, Language, retweet count, time stamp, media URL, screen name and more.

A number of interesting observations emerged from taking an initial look at the tweets, but what struck me is the different conversations that emerged around this issue and how dominant the youtube video was in these conversations. So I decided to visualize the different conversations and their size on twitter.

The next step I had to take was to clean the data, I started using Google refine, but decided to stick to basic excel and google spreadsheets to clean up the tweets. I used a basic filter to grab the unique tweets and then go through them to indicate the different conversations. There was a lot of counting, squinting at tweets and numbers but I managed to narrow the conversations down to the following topics:

1. Youtube Video

2. Defying the Driving Ban

3. Support for the Campaign

4. Prophet Mohamad

5. Ovary (A Saudi Religious figure had at some point indicated that if women drive it will damage their ovaries and their ability to have children).

6 Thelma and Louise

7 Bullying the Supporters of the campaign

8 Opposition to the Campaign

9 Campaign Launch

10 Driving ban does not equal to racism in the US

11 Random (too small to identify as a conversation)

Having counted the tweets the size of the conversation produced the following info graph (thanks to Ali’s help here):

The tweets and tweet recounts produced quite an interesting observation and while people would expect the event of women driving to garner the most ‘noise’, as it turns out a Saudi twist on a Bob Marley song was the most popular topic.

There are a lot more stories in these data and I’m hoping to continue exploring them with Ali and see what comes up!

Note: The data scraped follows the Twitter API rule, which means that the data is only 1% of all tweets around a specific query.

Narrative of education in Pakistani media sources

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Ali

The United Nations has recently announced that international donors have pledged $1 billion to provide education to millions of children in Pakistan. Nearly 25 million children are currently out of school in Pakistan, and about seven million of these children have yet to receive primary schooling, according to a recent report prepared by Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC).

Education in Pakistan has long been in a state of crisis. After Musharraf’s regime, Pakistan resumed elections in 2008, and media, judiciary and other democratic institutions have strengthened since then. What does the narrative of education look like in current times, and what kind of discourse underlies the education narrative? These are the questions that we explore in this inquiry.

In order to understand the narrative of education in Pakistan, we employed unsupervised learning algorithm on the text corpus provided by Alif Ailaan, an education advocacy group in Pakistan. The corpus comprises education stories curated from Pakistani media sources— including Dawn, The Express Tribune, Nation, The News and Pakistan Today— since Feb. 2013. The purpose of using unsupervised learning algorithm was to delineate underlying topical themes that are present in the text corpus.

We extracted five topic structures using our learning algorithm. The intuition behind our algorithm is that documents exhibit multiple topics. For instance, in a single document, ‘Malala’, ‘woman’ and ‘education’ are lumped together as one topic, and ‘federal’, ‘funding’ and ‘government’ are grouped into another topic. Using this technique we extracted keywords associated with five topics that our algorithm discovers.

Below is a bubble graph of the entire topical space.Each bubble represents proportional representation of a keyword in a topical cluster, which is differentiated by color.

Topics from education corpus

Now we will look at each topic individually. We have labeled the first topic as “Federal Education” because it loosely exhibits the discourse surrounding federal policies and issues on education in form of keywords like ‘federal’, administration’, ‘CADD’ and ‘FDE’. Both Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD) and Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) are constitutional bodies that are responsible for federal functions on education.

Topic: Federal Education

We have labeled the second cluster as “Higher Education” since it contains terms like ‘university’, ‘international’, ‘technology’, ‘faculty’, and ‘science’ which are characteristic of higher education in Pakistan. The Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (‘HEC’) is a constitutionally established institution that drives higher education efforts in Pakistan.

Topic: Higher Education

We have labeled the third cluster “Primary Education” because of terms like ‘child’, ‘primary’, ‘enrollment’, ‘school’, ‘literacy’, ‘teacher’, and ‘english’. Last year, successful primary enrollment drives took place at provincial level in Pakistan to register out-of-school children in public schools.

Topic: Primary Education

The fourth cluster of topics, which we have labeled “Malala”, is the most telling one. Malala became “the spokesperson for a generation of girls” after being shot in the head by Taliban. Almost half of rural young women in Pakistan have never attended school, according to a 2012-2013 UNESCO report. The name Malala is the only personal name that appears in the topical space on education in Pakistan. This cluster of words is also marked by tension between heterogeneous discourses in Pakistan including Talibanization, religion, security, peace, rights, and gender, highlighting the disruptive power of the “Malala” narrative on the discourses around education.

Topic: Malala

Lastly, the fifth cluster of topics includes provinces-related terms such as ‘sindh’,’punjab’, ‘local’, ‘district’, ‘provincial’. We have labeled this topic as “Provinces and Education”.

Topic: Provinces and Education

In the chart below we show a timeline representation of the news stories curated in the Alif Ailaan corpus. Malala gave her first speech at the United Nations in July 2013; an increase in the number of stories on education in July could be related to Malala’s speech. Similarly, spikes in Aug. 2013 and Sept. 2013 could be explained by enrolment drives in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunka provinces. These campaigns aimed at enrolling out-of-school children in public schools. Finally, the spike in Feb. 2014 could be related to the launch of Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) report, which highlighted Pakistan’s education crisis and made headlines in national newspapers. An in-depth analysis of these correlations is needed to provide more concrete insights on these trends.

News stories timeline

In summary, these preliminary findings suggest that the current narrative of education in Pakistani media landscape is rich and diverse and covers the entire gamut of concerns around education crisis. The topics we discovered suggest that the media attention on education is produced by an active state of affairs.