{"id":258911,"date":"2014-04-10T11:29:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-10T16:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258911"},"modified":"2024-01-28T11:30:25","modified_gmt":"2024-01-28T16:30:25","slug":"turkey-is-a-case-study-in-the-value-of-citizen-journalists-thanks-to-the-ones-behind-140journos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/04\/10\/turkey-is-a-case-study-in-the-value-of-citizen-journalists-thanks-to-the-ones-behind-140journos\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey is a case study in the value of citizen journalists, thanks to the ones behind @140journos"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Many traditional journalists seem to hate<\/a> the term \u201ccitizen journalism,\u201d for a variety of reasons \u2014 including the fact that it implies that anyone can engage in journalistic behavior, even if they don\u2019t work for a mainstream media outlet or have professional training. But there is no question that this trend is an important and useful one, and one recent example is the work being done by a group called @140journos<\/a> in Turkey, who have been crowdsourcing the verification of election results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Global Post describes it, the more than 300 volunteers behind @140journos \u2014 which was created in 2011<\/a> after a Turkish military incident that went uncovered by the media, and later gained notoriety during the demonstrations over the closure of Istanbul\u2019s Gezi Park \u2014 not only tracked all of the local voting behavior during the election using social media, but have since spent hundreds of hours<\/a> trying to verify the official reporting of the vote results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cTwenty citizen journalists \u2014 who have day jobs ranging from radio hosts to chefs and engineers \u2014 gathered in a small room to collect, verify and tweet news alerts about polling stations, protests, and unofficial election results. Four people were \u2018mining\u2019 on social media \u2014 digging for stories that 140journos may have missed \u2014 while two designers created colorful infographics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Crowdsourced verification of poll results<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Following the election, the members of @140journos have been using social tools and connections made through their own networks \u2014 as well as a public call-out on Facebook, Twitter and the group\u2019s website \u2014 to gather original photos<\/a> of ballot reports for every single one of Turkey\u2019s almost 200,000 polling stations. They\u2019ve compared these to official reports from the electoral council and found that in some cases the numbers don\u2019t match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Global Post, in just the first 48 hours, @140journos \u201cdocumented 368 inconsistent polling numbers\u201d in several thousand ballot reports from Ankara and Istanbul, and they are working on more. And they have opened this process up with a tool that allows anyone to compare official ballot results with photos from polling stations, which sounds a lot like the Guardian\u2019s famous \u201cMP Expenses\u201d crowdsourcing project. Said @140journos co-founder<\/a> Ogulcan Ekiz:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cWe wanted to ask, what\u2019s the power of social media? What if we open this to people and let them check their own ballot? It will be a moment for the Turkish public to check its own elections. This is the new thing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\"140journos\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Some professional journalists might disagree, but that kind of behavior sounds a lot like journalism to me \u2014 and fairly useful journalism to boot. As I pointed out in an earlier post about Turkey, the value of social media as a journalistic tool becomes even more obvious when you see<\/a> how it works in a country where the traditional media has failed to do its job properly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not surprising at all that such a country would ban Twitter and YouTube. This apparently caused difficulties for @140journos during their crowdsourced verification process, but they managed to get around the blockage by using VPNs and other tools (the Twitter ban has been lifted following<\/a> a court decision, but the block on YouTube remains in effect).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journalism as a communication project<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s equally fascinating about @140journos is that many of them don\u2019t even consider themselves to be journalists, or what they do to be journalism \u2014 or at least, they aren\u2019t particularly concerned about using those labels or defining what they mean (unlike most professional journalists). As co-founder Engin Onder told the Nieman Journalism Lab<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cNone of us on our team has any intention of being a journalist\u2026 it\u2019s better to explore this stuff without knowing the journalism principles, because it\u2019s not a journalism project, actually \u2014 it\u2019s a communication project.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This fits with my theory that some of the most important and interesting acts of journalism of the last few years have been committed by non-journalists, or at least non-professional journalists \u2014 including people like<\/a> former NPR editor Andy Carvin during the Arab Spring (who called himself an information DJ and described Twitter as his newsroom) and Brown Moses, a British blogger who became a self-taught expert in the weaponry<\/a> used by Syrian terrorists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This doesn\u2019t mean such acts should be seen as \u2014 or are even capable of \u2014 replacing traditional journalism, except perhaps in countries like Turkey, where it needs replacing. Instead, it is simply enlarging the practice and expanding its reach, and that is a good thing. For more on @140journos, see the Nieman Journalism Lab\u2019s recent transcript of an interview<\/a> that sociologist Zeynep Tufekci did with Engin Onder at a Berkman Center event at Harvard University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Post and photo thumbnails courtesy of Thinkstock \/ triloks<\/a> and Ogulcan Ekiz<\/em><\/p>\n

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Many traditional journalists seem to hate the term \u201ccitizen journalism,\u201d for a variety of reasons \u2014 including the fact that it implies that anyone can engage in journalistic behavior, even if they don\u2019t work for a mainstream media outlet or have professional training. But there is no question that this trend is an important and useful one, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Turkey is a case study in the value of citizen journalists, thanks to the ones behind @140journos”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258911"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258913,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258911\/revisions\/258913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}