Start making sense: a three-tier approach to citizen journalism

Abstract

This commentary considers citizen journalism emerging from the Syrian Civil War and argues that its usefulness is dependent on an “interpreter tier” of user-generated media analysts. In contrast to discourse celebrating more direct forms of citizen journalism, the piece emphasizes the importance of intermediary layers of meaning-making as the means by which complex fields of amateur information can be made intelligible. This “interpreter tier,” although often ignored in popular and scholarly discourse, takes on an increasingly important function as mainstream sources must increasingly rely on citizen materials produced in far off places.

Keywords

citizen journalism user-generated content new media social media Middle East Syria Storyful

On 5 September 2013, in the midst of intense domestic debate over the use of American force against the Assad regime in Syria, New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers offered a startling story obtained via a Syrian citizen journalist. In an article entitled “Brutality of Syrian rebels posing dilemma in the West,” Chivers describes a profoundly disturbing video that was “smuggled” out by a former rebel fighter: seven Syrian regime soldiers lay pressed to the ground, with men pointing guns at the backs of their heads. The leader of the gunmen, Abdul Samad Issa, recites a summary of the doomed men’s alleged crimes. The men are executed.

Chivers reported the video as having been recorded in the spring of 2013 and employed it as a key data point in making the case that extremist groups such as Al Qaeda were growing among the ranks of rebel forces. Ultimately, the piece was meant to give pause to those who supported providing US military assistance to the Assad regime’s enemies. American efforts, Chivers argued, “could inadvertently strengthen Islamic extremists and criminals” (Chivers, 2013).

Chivers’ exposé embodies one, often celebrated, version of how new media can democratize and enhance the news-making process. In this article, I describe this approach as the “two-tier” model of citizen journalism, in which amateur producers expose new truths via online technologies and mainstream media sources echo a small proportion of this information. In the case of the Issa execution, the first tier was occupied by a brave local, armed with lightweight and low-cost video technology, who was able to use the internet to expose an injustice. Just as citizens during the Arab Spring employed emerging technologies to “disseminate their journalism and opinions faster than governments [could] control or regulate it,” this video revealed information that a variety of powerful interests both in and outside of Syria did not want to be made public (Hamdy, 2009: 92).

The New York Times and its reporters, in this case, occupy the second tier. The mainstream media giant, in part due to the freedom that online publishing offered Chivers, was able to overcome the institutional factors that scholars often bemoan as inhibiting the use of user-generated content (UGC) in news reportage (Paulussen and Ugille, 2008). A celebratory analysis might suggest that these two tiers, working in unison, combined to make a significant step towards the “radical and systematic reconceptualization of the public sphere” that scholars argue that citizen journalism and new media technologies offer (Antony and Thomas, 2010).

However, this optimistic view is marred by one small blemish: Chivers got the story wrong. Although the images he put forth were authentic in the broad sense, his details were off. Most egregiously, the video was a year older than the journalist claimed, a significant blow to an argument built around increasing extremism among Syrian rebels. Furthermore, the executioner, Abdul Samad Issa, is not a member of Al Qaeda or any other known Jihadist group. None of these facts change the brutality of the video or the moral repugnance of its contents. They do, however, call into question both the specifics of Chivers’ political argument and, more importantly, the methodology behind this sort of journalism. If Chivers does not know what year a video is from, and if the producer of the video is willing to mislead on this account, how can citizen journalism be trusted to inform our understanding of life and death issues such as military intervention?

This article does not aim to repudiate the two-tier approach to citizen journalism on a wholesale level. There are times at which citizen reports play a crucial role simply by exposing new truths and forcing mainstream outlets to report on events that might otherwise go unnoticed. What I wish to emphasize, however, is the reality of a different, three-tier approach to citizen journalism that has become particularly central with regards to Syria and offers a model for other similarly complex situations. In this system, a middle “interpreter tier” comprised of semi-professional online journalists plays the crucial role of mediating between Syrian citizen journalists and mainstream outlets. Not only do the journalists who make up this middle tier interpret and verify potentially important citizen-produced news content, they also follow stories across long periods of time, following new developments even when mainstream outlets are temporarily uninterested in a story.

This interpreter tier, as it is currently situated in the still-emerging field of citizen journalism, can be identified through three defining characteristics: (1) members possess a wealth of contacts both among mainstream journalists as well as individuals involved in the production and uploading of citizen reports, with an emphasis on the latter; (2) members develop long-term commitments to a specific region or story, following it even when mainstream sources have ceased to focus on it; and, (3) members’ work is dependent on active collaboration, via user-oriented online tools such as interactive wiki-maps, “open newsroom” forums and popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Although the interpreter class heretofore has been primarily of the semi-professional variety, with members depending on donations or academic support, this aspect is being challenged by companies such as Storyful, which aim to professionalize the tier.

This article uses the Syrian Civil War as a point of reference. However, it is important to note that interpreter tier work is vital in all cases in which unmanageably large amounts of citizen-produced information relates to a developing news narrative. Focusing on the case of Syria’s alleged chemical weapons attack in August 2013, I detail the way in which this more complex, and perhaps ultimately less democratic, three tier approach to citizen journalism serves to reduce errors such as Chivers’ and enhance the usefulness of user-generated news content.

More than exposure

The rise of citizen journalism has been a central theme in both popular and scholarly discourse surrounding the evolution of news making over the past half decade. In popular accounts, a celebratory narrative has emerged in which the Arab Spring, with its live-tweeters detailing protests and cameraphone videographers documenting violence, cemented the place of user-generated content in mainstream journalism. In a year-end retrospective story in 2011, the Guardian noted that, due to the Arab uprisings as well as the American Occupy protests, citizen photography and videography had officially “entered the mainstream” (Batty, 2011). That same year, CNN initiated its iReport awards, recognizing stories that were reported first and sometimes exclusively through the re-transmission of materials obtained from non-professional journalists. Months later, a retired Chinese bureaucrat, Liu Futang, won the first ever Chinese Environmental Press award for citizen journalism for an exposé on pollution in the oil industry (Watts, 2010).

In all of these cases, narratives of citizen journalism neatly fit the two-tier model, with a vast, more or less atomized array of users uploading content, some of which is selected for remediation by mainstream outlets. In following this pattern, critical and journalistic accounts have focused primarily on two elements of citizen journalism practice: exposure and immediacy. The innovation of user-generated journalism is framed through its ability to make public stories that might go unnoticed and to expedite the coverage of stories that the mainstream has listlessly pursued. Thus, the value of user-generated content is separated from other journalistic virtues such as variety of sources or depth of verification, in order to emphasize the opening of the public sphere that new media makes possible.

This evaluative tendency is also pronounced in the scholarly literature that has developed around the subject, with numerous critics praising social media’s ability to expand rapidly the content of the public sphere (Bruns, 2010; Compton and Benedetti, 2010; Cammaerts, 2011; Flew, 2009; Shirky, 2008). Antony and Thomas (2010), for example, consider the case of the 2009 Oscar Grant shooting, focusing on the wealth of controversial, debate-stirring material that citizen journalists produced and uploaded. The sheer exposure of the vicious nature of the Grant shooting via citizen videography tools, they write, “jolted the public from mere passive consumption” and encouraged debate both online and off (2010: 1285). Although the analysis gives significant weight to the subsequent discussion that took place online among users, the process of citizen journalism production described is limited to the standard two tier conception. In this instance the first tier – citizens with cameraphones – employed Web 2.0 technologies to either bypass or influence the second tier mainstream media that failed in its duty to bring this key story to the public.

Murthy (2011) considers the question of citizen journalism on Twitter along similar lines, focusing on the cases of the 2008 Mumbai bombings and the “Miracle on the Hudson” landing of United flight 1549. His emphasis is on live revelations and the ability of citizen journalists “to break profound news stories to a global public” by posting images, videos and quick text bursts to Twitter (2011: 786). Twitter’s primary virtue, in this analysis, lies in its ability to bring to light more or less unfiltered information directly from the source of otherwise uncovered news stories.

Central to Murthy’s analysis is the relationship between the first and second tiers of citizen journalism. On the one hand, he notes the potential exploitation of citizen journalists, that the user-generated information may merely “represent a new means for arguing traditional media to pick up a scoop” (2011: 784). This is a sub-theme across much citizen journalism scholarship, perhaps most notably in Palmer’s (2013) critique of CNN’s complex interactions with unpaid iReporters. However, both Murthy and Palmer ultimately embrace a more or less direct relationship between amateur producers andmainstream media, with Murthy noting that legacy outlets have become increasingly willing to use citizen tweets. Although he acknowledges the undemocratically “stratified” nature of Twitter in terms of users’ uneven levels of access and influence, left intact is a clean division between tweeting citizens and mainstream sources.

Although little direct scholarly attention has yet to be paid to the complex online world of Syrian citizen journalism, the work that has been done similarly emphasizes the impact of raw citizen materials on the news content of mainstream outlets. In an Internews-funded study, Harkin et al. (2012) analyze the use of user-generated content from Syria on Al Jazeera Arabic and BBC Arabic. Via a combination of interviews and content analysis, the report offers a paradigmatic example of the two tier approach scholars tend to citizen journalism. On the basis of the interviews, the report notes that “detailed verification policies” are in place within each outlet’s newsrooms (Harkin et al., 2012: 33). The report identifies a problem, however, in the stations’ common inability to accurately identify the original sources of individual videos or pictures. This difficulty emerges in part from the fact that much of the user-generated material arrives at these mainstream outlets not from individual users, but from intermediary organizations that compile, contextualize and verify these materials. The result is a process that makes the material easier to understand and enhances trustworthiness, but fits very poorly with scholarly conceptions of a two tier system of user-generated content (Harkin et al., 2012: 33). Such a process, I argue, is necessary for the sheer mass of user-generated material to possibly be made legible and coherent in a situation such as the war in Syria.

However, the citizen journalism narrative that has become the discursive norm represents a hindrance in this case, as outlets such as the BBC have been reluctant to officially acknowledge the centrality of independent groups and individuals beyond actual content producers. This interpreter tier, no doubt, poses significant challenges both to traditional news organizations and those who aim to preserve the transparent, democratic ideal of citizen journalism. The interpreters are sometimes politically aligned and, by their very nature, do work that is difficult for the uninitiated to follow. They nearly always lack traditional credentials that make them easily identified to potentially skeptical audiences. However, they are absolutely essential to the process of making useful more complicated constellations of user-generated news material.

Getting it right

Not all instances of user-generated content require an interpreter tier in order to bridge the distance between the first and second tiers of citizen journalism. In the case of the Oscar Grant shooting, for example, the details of the videos may have been apparent enough that their place in a broader unfolding of events was more or less clear to viewers as they first came upon it. In this case, as Antony and Thomas (2010) argue, there is significant value in letting the public debate the meaning of the material in an open forum or presenting it in a news broadcast without commentary. However, in the case of the war in Syria, and many other complex situations, such an ideal is unrealistic and prone to crucial misunderstandings, as documented in the case of the Chivers jihad video. In this section I use the case of the apparent Syrian chemical attack of August 2013 in order to detail the function of the interpreter tier and to begin the process of offering a generalizable understanding of this element of citizen journalism.

The story of citizen journalism and the 21 August 2013 gas attack on East Ghouta begins well before innocent Syrians began dying from chemical poisoning. From the beginning of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, a small group of dedicated social media monitors began actively compiling and analyzing the wealth of citizen videos and reports that were emerging out of the violence. These monitors can be roughly broken down into two interdependent groups that work in concert in order to take first-hand citizen reports and make them intelligible for outside sources, including mainstream news outlets. Closer to the fighting, there are Syrian activist groups, the vast majority of which are politically and militarily aligned with the rebel forces that are fighting the Assad regime. Primary among these are the resistance groups known as the Local Coordinating Committees of Syria (LCCs) and the Shams News Network (SNN), a web-based organization that compiles and distributes videos taken by local citizens. These outlets have procedures in place by which they internally verify the authenticity of their videos as well as document the veracity of the descriptions of them that they provide. Their primary guarantee, however, comes in the form of their institutional reputations, which many journalists, including those at BBC Arabic, take to be sufficient collateral to prevent the LCCs or SNN from fabricating or inflating information for short-term political gain (Harkin et al., 2012: 33).

Just as crucial to the process that brings citizen journalism to a broader audience, however, are individuals and institutions based thousands of miles away from the fighting. Over the course of the war, this class of interpreters has been primarily of the semi-professional variety, staffed by low-paid or unpaid watchers of citizen journalism from across the Middle East. Two key figures among the group have been James Miller and Elliot Higgins, known as “Brown Moses” in the context of his work on Syria. Miller spent 2011 and 2012 working for the University of Birmingham-funded website EA Worldview, compiling daily live blogs of the events taking place in Syria. Each day Miller, working in concert with contacts in Syria, including LCC members, developed a narrative of the war’s major actions by compiling and cross-checking hundreds of YouTube videos, tweets, Facebook postings and other bits of citizen journalism with tools such as wiki-maps and geolocation software available freely on the web. Using these resources and collaborating with other Syria watchers, Miller was able to convert the seemingly unmanageable mass of information coming out of Syria every day into material useful for non-experts. In 2012, for example, Miller pieced together the details of a reported attack on the Syrian town of Salaheddine which had been the cause of great dispute. Cross-verifying videos of bombs landing in the Aleppo suburb with images and reports of blasts in a far off town, he was able to use satellite mapping technology to identify the small military base now believed to have enacted the shooting (Miller and Sienkiewicz, 2012). His work, though only remunerated at sub-poverty level wages, has been cited by outlets ranging from Al Jazeera to The Atlantic to the Guardian in the context of reporting on citizen journalism in Syria.

Elliot Higgins, whose blog and Twitter accounts are entitled “Brown Moses,” has carved out a key place in the interpreter tier despite not having even the minimal institutional support from which Miller benefited. A news junkie with no professional experience, Higgins began in 2011 to collect citizen journalism from around the world based on a belief that “social media was being overlooked by the mainstream” media (Higgins, 2013). Eventually, as the stories of the Libyan and Syrian conflicts began consuming an enormous portion of his database, Higgins developed an interest in what he believed to be the least understood, most important element of the citizen journalism emanating from the wars: weaponry. Despite having no personal experience with firearms, Higgins dove head-first into the world of artillery, teaching himself the names, specifications and origins of weapons ranging from small arms to anti-aircraft systems. As both social and mainstream media circulated rumors regarding who was arming whom in these conflicts, Higgins was piecing together citizen reports, cross-referencing them with Miller and others, and using this information to make informed assessments of this crucial element of the story. Higgins self-funded his research through the website Kickstarter, relying upon donations from his readers, a critical mass of whom are mainstream reporters who use his work to make sense out of the chaotic world of Syrian user-generated content.

On 21 August 2013, Miller, Higgins and a handful of other citizen journalism interpreters were presented with their most important challenge to date. Reports of a chemical attack outside of Damascus first began emerging around midnight American east coast time. Miller, who is based near Boston, notes that most of his colleagues and the bulk of what I describe as the interpreter tier of Syrian citizen journalism are based in Europe and were thus sleeping as videos and images began reaching Twitter and YouTube. Miller, who at this point had left his job at EA Worldview, received hundreds of tweets, Facebook messages and Skype calls from sources in Syria, most of whom identified themselves as part of the resistance forces. “It was like being a phone operator after Pearl Habor,” he describes. His efforts that night, as documented on his Twitter timeline,@MillerMENA, reveal a dual emphasis in his work interpreting citizen journalism in the early aftermath of the attack. First, he was sending videos and photographs to doctors both in Syria and abroad, in order to help determine from what the victims of the attack might be suffering. Second, he attempted to guide the process of citizen journalism production in order to help expedite a verification process he knew would be of crucial importance in the coming days. In addition to putting out calls for potentially relevant videos, he also called on people in Syria to video, if safe, victims entering hospitals as opposed to only recording them inside, for the purpose of verification (Miller, 2013).

As the days following the attack went on, the emphasis of the interpreter tier of citizen journalism was placed heavily on determining from where the possible chemicals were launched and contributing to the discussion of what, precisely, was the agent used in the attack. Given his newfound expertise on weaponry, Elliot Higgins immediately took up a central role in the investigation. On his Brown Moses blog, Higgins collected dozens of videos, piecing together their relationships to one another by finding common landmarks and sync points, as well as comparing the images to satellite and user-generated maps available online. His efforts at identification and geolocation, however, were boosted by a new space in which he could exchange information: Storyful’s Open Newsroom.

Storyful is an Ireland-based “social media news agency” that aims to “make UGC safe for newsrooms” (McMahon, interview with the author, 2013). It is, in essence, a company aimed at organizing and monetizing the interpreter tier of citizen journalism. Though it makes some elements of its work public, Storyful’s business model is based on providing mainstream outlets with proprietary information derived from processes similar to those Miller, Higgins and other semi-professional members of the interpreter tier employ. On 27 June, Storyful introduced the “Open Newsroom,” a Google-based platform in which invited participants, including founding members Miller and Higgins, can publicly workshop their findings with one another.

Storyful’s Open Newsroom served as an incubator for crucial analysis, as the highest levels of the American government engaged in a debate over how to respond to the Assad regime’s alleged war crime. In the shadow of America’s misleading and ill-conceived approach to intelligence leading up to the second Iraq War, the importance of verifying and interpreting user-generated evidence in this case can hardly be overstated. In the end, reports emerged from multiple sources providing solid evidence as to the timeline, geography and impact of the attack. Although no indisputable proof of chemical weaponry was possible from the interpreted citizen reports, a preponderance of circumstantial evidence emerged.

Miller, Higgins and others developed individual arguments and interpretations on their own websites and presented them in the Open Newsroom, revising their theses as new information entered the discussion. These analyses became extremely influential within the interpreter tier and were occasionally quoted by mainstream sources. The most effective conduit between citizens uploading information and mainstream media sources, however, was Storyful itself. Felim McMahon, a longtime journalist who began working for Storyful in 2011, took on the role of incorporating information from his own sources and analysis with the work of Open Newsroom contributors. Ultimately, he was able to produce what is taken by many to be an authoritative, interactive map of the incident that allows users to click on locations to find both information about what occurred there and to watch YouTube videos verified as having been shot from that space at a specific time. The work was used by a wide array of major news sources including ABC News and Reuters. A variety of these mainstream outlets went a step further, producing separate, short stories about Storyful and McMahon’s work in turning citizen journalism into hard evidence in the midst of heated domestic debate. The New York Times (Sisario, 2013), The Global News (Logan, 2013) and USA Today (Rieder, 2013) all explicitly cited Storyful in explaining the use to which citizen journalism had been put. Few mainstream outlets, however, made any mention of the Open Newsroom or the less professionalized members of the interpreter tier who played central roles in this process.

Conclusion: stuck in the middle

In an article entitled “Open source and journalism,” Lewis and Usher (2013) put forth an intriguing conception of how journalism might be reconfigured in the age of social media. They suggest that journalists, drawing upon the growth of computer technology in media production, embrace the values of “open source culture” (2013: 607). In doing so, they believe a productive reframing of journalism as “knowledge management” can take place, whereby stories would be metaphorically understood as comparable to the source code of a computer program (2013: 612). Citizens, they suggest, might be asked to amend, substitute and reframe elements of the “code” that could use improvement, based on their own understandings and unique perspectives. The result, the authors contend, would be a reframed understanding of newswork as a “shared, unfinished and imperfect process” (2013: 613).

In many ways, this “open source” ethic lies at the heart of the interpreter tier of citizen journalism that I have described throughout this article. The Open Newsroom, within which McMahon, Miller and Higgins eventually came to work together, appears, at least at first blush, to be an instantiation of this very ideal. However, it is useful to continue interrogating this software metaphor in order to understand both the potentials and limitations of open source journalism.

There is a key difference between software code and current events reporting that must be acknowledged. Although a select, highly trained (if often self-taught) group of people feel comfortable rewriting computer code, nearly everyone has the ability to comment or amend a news story, at least in theory. This difference gives the impression that open source news writing might be far more democratic than it often is in practice. It perhaps also lends itself to a two tier understanding of user-generated news practice, whereby individuals add their ideas and an overseer selects and distributes them. In the case of citizen journalism, however, the computer code metaphor must be taken further. Just as people spend years of their life learning computer language nuances in order to productively contribute to open source code, people like Miller and Higgins have an almost obsessive commitment to understanding the inner workings of Syrian citizen journalism. Had they not been following the story for years, coming to understand the subtle meanings and common mistakes made by people uploading materials from the Syrian war zone, their contributions to the “code” would be unhelpful, if not outright dangerous. C.J. Chivers’ efforts to expose jihadism among the rebels were just that.

There is no question that open, public exchange of information is valuable. It is extremely useful to scroll through the archives of the Open Newsroom in order to understand where certain conclusions are derived from. However, it would be no more beneficial for untrained contributors to be amending this information than it would be for people who merely play a video game but know no computer language to change its source code. Every individual has a story to which she can contribute, but not everyone can contribute productively to every story. The Open Newsroom depends upon a selection process that encourages contributors to trust one another’s expertise.

For this reason it is important for scholars and popular critics to acknowledge the role of a central, interpreter tier in the transmission of complex fields of citizen journalism. Although this reconceptualization damages idealistic notions of true open access to news dissemination, it is crucial to understand for reasons beyond even its conceptual value to media scholars. The interpreter tier is, for the most part, unpaid and unrecognized. Storyful is making an intriguing attempt to rectify this, and the early results appear positive. However, given the scope of global news and the unpredictability of future events, it is unrealistic to assume that Storyful or any other company will be able, on its own, to be fully prepared to address all of the citizen journalism that emerges as time moves on. Storyful will require the help of people such as Miller and Higgins stationed across the world to provide insights and work in concert with journalists like McMahon. To function, the interpreter tier requires interaction, debate and cross-referencing. Thus, despite the apparent desire of mainstream news sources to elevate the well-funded Storyful above its semi-professional brethren, it is crucial that media watchers continue to understand and acknowledge the full breadth of the interpreter tier. This group of intermediaries is not only necessary in order to understand the complex events developing in Syria. It will prove increasingly essential across the world as citizens, governments and other institutions learn not only how to produce citizen materials, but also potentially how to better sow confusion via overloads of contradictory user-generated materials. Without a robust interpreter class, mistakes such as those offered by C.J. Chivers in his jihad exposé story threaten to diminish the tremendous potential of citizen journalism.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

References

Antony

Thomas

(2010) ‘This is citizen journalism at its finest’: YouTube and the public sphere in the Oscar Grant shooting incident. New Media & Society 12(8): 1280–1296.

Batty

(2011) Arab spring leads surge in events captured on cameraphones. 11 December. Available at: www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/29/arab-spring-captured-on-cameraphones (accessed March 2014).

Bruns

(2010) News produsage in a pro-am mediasphere: why citizen journalism matters.In: Meikle

Redden

(eds) News Online: Transformations and Continuities. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cammaerts

(2011) Disruptive sharing in a digital age: rejecting neoliberalism? Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25(1): 47–62.

Chivers

(2013) Brutality of Syrian rebels posing dilemma in West. 5 September. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/brutality-of-syrian-rebels-pose-dilemma-in-west.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed September 2013).

Compton

Benedetti

(2010) Labour, new media and the institutional restructuring of journalism. Journalism Studies 11(4): 487–499.

Flew

(2009) Democracy, participation and convergent media: case studies in contemporary online news journalism in Australia. Communication, Politics & Culture 42(2): 87–109.

Hamdy

(2009) Arab citizen journalism in action: challenging mainstream media, authorities and media laws. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 6(1): 92–112.

Harkin

Anderson

Morgan

Smith

(2012) Deciphering User-generated Content in Transitional Societies: A Syria Coverage Case Study. Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and Internews. Available at: https://www.internews.org/sites/default/files/resources/InternewsWPSyria_2012-06-web.pdf (accessed March 2014).

10.

Higgins

(2013) Interview by M Sienkiewicz, 10 September.

11.

Lewis

Usher

(2013) Open source and journalism: toward new frameworks for imagining news innovation. Media, Culture & Society 35(5): 602–619.

12.

Logan

(2013) Explainer: verifying videos of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria. 21 August. Available at: http://globalnews.ca/news/794372/explainer-verifying-videos-of-the-alleged-chemical-weapons-attack-in-syria/ (accessed September 2013).

13.

McMahon

(2013) Interview by M Sienkiewicz, 13 September.

14.

Miller

(2013) @millermena [Twitter message]. 21 August. Available at: https://twitter.com/MillerMENA/status/370026896655781888 (accessed September 2013).

15.

Miller

Sienkiewicz

(2012) Straight news from the citizens of Syria. 16 August. Available at: www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/straight_news_from_the_citizen.php?page=all (accessed September 2013).

16.

Murthy

(2011) Twitter: microphone for the masses? Media, Culture & Society 33(5): 779.

17.

Palmer

(2013) ‘iReporting’ an uprising: CNN and citizen journalism in network culture. Television & New Media 14(5): 367.

18.

Paulussen

Ugille

(2008) User generated content in the newsroom: professional and organisational constraints on participatory journalism. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 5(2): 24–41.

19.

Rieder

(2013) Storyful verifies social media from Syria. 5 September. Available at: www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/rieder/2013/09/05/storyful-verifying-video-on-social-media-from-syria/2771029/ (accessed September 2013).

20.

Shirky

(2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

21.

Sisario

(2013) For news from Syrian battleground, a reliance on social media. 30 August. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2013/08/31/business/media/for-news-from-syrian-battleground-a-reliance-on-social-media.html?_r=0 (accessed September 2013).

22.

Watts

(2010) China’s first environmental press awards praises fresh journalism. 14 May. Available at: www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/may/14/chinas-first-environmental-press-awards (accessed September 2013).