Mansoura workshop: On improving citizen media in Egypt
How do you verify news on social networks? How do you build your network
and provide accurate reporting? What makes a good photo? Last week, I
went to the city of Mansoura to help 14 young Egyptians answer these
questions and develop their analytical skills and sense of judgment in
order to become better citizen journalists.
The training in Mansoura was part
of a series of workshops organized by Meedan and Birmingham City University to
train citizen journalists to improve their work with social media.
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As we went through presentations
published on http://arabcitizenmedia.org,
we had long interesting discussions reflecting the variety of our group.
Some of the trainees were students;
others were working with the local newspaper and our host for the two days, Sa7afat Welad el-Balad. Other participants were
responsible for the websites and media of liberal political groups like April 6
and ElBaradei’s campaign or the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party
in their city.
It was also exciting to have two
trainees from outside Mansoura as they came from Damietta to join us.
During the workshop, I wanted to
highlight the relationship between social and mainstream media. We discussed
this while going through the platform developed by Meedan and adopted by
Al-Masry Al-Youm. The platform
would help in bridging the gap and building trust between journalists and
citizen journalists, thus leading to a healthy, complementary relationship
between the two sides of any story.
We also discussed how citizen
journalists could build their credibility with followers and readers, by always
mentioning the source of the news and trying to verify everything they haven't seen with their own eyes through different sources.
During one of the sessions,
participants were divided into three groups, where each was asked to write a
series of tweets or Facebook updates about a certain event. One group wrote
about protests in Damietta, the second group wrote about protests in Mansoura
and clashes when two senior MBs were giving an address there, the third group
wrote about our workshop.
After discussing the tweets and how
we could have made them better, the groups exchanged the material with each
other. Then each group was asked to write a blog or a report from their
colleague’s tweets.
In the next day, each person
presented a blog post they wrote. Trainees then provided feedback on each other's posts, and voted on the best report whose writer was awarded a Flip
camera.
We ended our workshop by going
through more presentations, including the Publishing offenses and Creative
Commons so that they would know their rights and how to protect themselves.
I enjoyed the workshop very much,
as it gave me the chance to share experiences with this great group of people.
I really hope they enjoyed it too and look forward, as much as I do, to share
posts on the Facebook group we created to continue our discussions on their
work.
.
Other trainers shared their
experiences on workshops that were held in Cairo
with Lilian Wagdy, Mahalla
with Tarek Amr and in Alexandria
with Ramy Raoof.
