More soon on SF and LA (where I will be at the Media Re:Public conference at USC Annenberg tomorrow)…

Some of the top Kenyan bloggers have been providing compelling updates since the beginning of the election campaign – of those that I read regularly, Kenyan Pundit and Mental Acrobatics particularly stand out – and it’s worth keeping an eye on Global Voices’ Kenya Elections page. That said, we’ve been finding it difficult to track down much citizen video or audio at all from Kenya thusfar – if you come across any, or we’re missing something obvious, please let me know via the comments, or upload it to the Hub. I’ve been wondering why it’s taking time for video to emerge – is the footage out there, but just not online yet? Was it just too insecure and dangerous to film during the first few days? Here’s a by no means comprehensive scour for video, audio and photos out of Kenya in recent days…

Video / Audio / Photos:

The only source providing genuine street-level citizen reporting that I can find is AfricaNews’ Voices Of Africa, which equips local reporters with cellphones, and dubs them “camjos”. It’s a general news site, using traditional media reporters, and the range of post-election reports includes police turning back protesters, and an interview with a Somali refugee, as well as an interview with a tourist industry representative and signs of daily life returning to normal in Nairobi. The reports are of varying quality and interest, but they provide a much more street-level view, and point to the potential video-enabled cellphones might bring to human rights reporting.

It’s not quite clear to me whether this is related to an initiative by Media Focus on Africa, a Dutch-Kenyan NGO, equipped several reporters around the country with high-end video-enabled mobile phones – the reports on this site appear to end on 21st December, before the election.

Over at YouTube, another Kenyan online effort, Kenya Votes, conducted vox pops with ordinary Kenyans in the run-up to the elections, including this young woman expressing her fears about tribalism:

As you might expect, there’s plenty of traditional media coverage on YouTube – Kenya’s own Nation TV, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and CNN are all putting video reports and interviews online. Rocketboom’s Ruud Elmendorp has a short video report from the days before the election. Currently individual users, like YouTube newbie theweepingsoul, seem to be using news images culled from the web in homages to the photojournalists and other journalists getting images out and in pleas to end the violence.

Kenya Indymedia is beginning to upload some brief audio interviews, including one with a Somali man considering returning to Somalia (mp3) after the recent violence. Slum-TV is blogging, but yet to upload video.

As for photographs, there’s some extraordinary photojournalism online – Reuters and Panos Pictures (click through to the News section for their latest pictures from Kenya), for example – and a quick scan of Flickr reveals a handful of users such as Kenyan photojournalist DEMOSH, blogger Afromusing, and other individuals who witnessed events while in Kenya, but as with video, the lack thusfar of citizen or activist images online has been striking. Blogger Joseph Karoki has been pulling together images from a variety of news sources to provide visual updates.

Mapping:
The UN provided some striking images via satellite, showing the worst concentration of violence by looking at the number of fires burning, available in lo-res (1, 2) and hi-res (1, 2) (via IRIN).

Perhaps the most promising and practical initiative to date is Ushahidi (via White African), a Google Maps mashup enabling individuals to report incidents of post-election violence, including some video already (taken by Afromusing). What’s particularly interesting about this is that the incident reports are being verified with local civil society before being posted, but individuals visiting the site can also submit further information related to particular incidents.

It also demonstrates how rapidly these new tools can be adapted and updated. One commenter asks that “rape” be added to the list of incidents, and lo, there it is. As a basic template for tracking this kind of crisis, it’s a very good start. Inclusion of some kind of timeline, a la Oakland Crimespotting, would be a useful addition, but for 2 days’ work, kudos goes to the team (Kenyan Pundit, Mental Acrobatics, and White African).

Ways to act:
Pambazuka has been active in coordinating with a wide cross-section of civil society, calling for assistance in establishing Rape Crisis Centres, setting up an international petition, and posting regular updates on its Action Alert Blog, including a planned March for Peace, Truth and Justice today.

Avaaz has a tool to help individuals to write to their Foreign Minister to call for a transparent inquiry into the disputed election.

For me, the 2002 series I Have A Right To… still represents a good benchmark for how the BBC’s World Service can knit together human rights resources of real and lasting value – and that others can use and build on.

Now, the World Service is celebrating its 75th Anniversary with a season of programmes, debates and chunks of participation related to freedom of speech, in an upcoming season called Free To Speak [thanks, Solana].

As usual, no one does global broadcasting quite like the World Service, with Roy Greenslade fronting a four-part radio series on the freedom of the press, for example, but the online experience feels pretty disjointed by comparison. There are elements in the online parts of the season that hold useful nuggets, however:

- A timeline of the history of broadcasting, including “media minutes” for each year, and which at the time of writing stretches up to the 1970s. There’s a lot of conflict, a lot of politics, and perhaps a bit too much of the presenter, and not enough of the actual audio, but it’s still of value, as this audio clip from 1965 shows, attesting to the power of the televised image in galvanizing the civil rights struggle in the USA…

- A selection of six conflict-related images from Magnum Photos (a Hub participant) from an exhibition at Bush House, the central London building where BBC World Service is housed…

- Photographs sent in by people holding their favourite political protest slogans… [all seemingly outside Bush House..]

- And a request for people to contribute their stories of freedom of speech to the MemoryShare timeline…

Care to point us to any current (and more effective) examples of this kind of online initiative from local media around the world?

A day of high contrast for Ndesanjo, with the relief of finally getting down to business in Gleneagles overshadowed by the attacks on London yesterday.

And I thought, wait a minute, why do the leaders of the world’s most advanced ‘democracies’ meet so far away from the people they represent? Had they committed some heinous crime? [...] And then Thursday morning, ordinary people going to work, picking up groceries, touring London, bore the brunt of someone’s anger against the G8, while the leaders themselves were caged safely away.

Machrine posted for yesterday’s Metro, making a vow to cover climate change when she gets back to Uganda, and her first ever article on this subject asks, Is Africa Burning?

John has provoked considerable debate over on BBC Online’s pages, and I am not surprised. He’s given a fresh and candid perspective on the experiences of an African journalist covering an international summit, and today’s diary in particular shows the considerable frustrations that African journalists have to put up with in a day’s work:

Yesterday we were told that [the African leaders attending G8] would have a press conference today. But as I write this, no African journalist I have met here seems to know where our presidents are. [...] Unlike in western nations where the presidents and prime ministers are accessible to the local media, for an African journalist, getting an interview with an African president may take a lifetime.

and here’s Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

After this morning’s terror attacks on London, the atmosphere around the Gleneagles media centre changed markedly, and the tone of John’s piece for BBC Online reflects that sombre mood:

The air is now extremely gloomy up here and I am not finding the excitement and energy that I usually see with journalists.

Those from London will be worried about friends, family and colleagues, and those from abroad will perhaps be feeling cut off from the real theatre of action, even as they are appalled at the loss of lives and threats of further terror.

Like John, many of the journalists have seen the aftermath of violence and terror in their own countries, and they’re all shocked by this morning’s events, and, like John, offer their condolences to the people of London.

Ndesanjo’s currently on air as part of a four-person panel discussing whether protest works, and if so, what kinds of protest…

Link

John, you might be thinking, has been a bit quiet on the blog of late. But, apart from filing for the Guardian on Monday, being interviewed on Dublin’s Newstalk 106FM this morning, and filing for his paper the Sunday Standard, he’s been busy writing a Daily G8 Diary for BBC Online, which you can read and comment on here. But do come back…

All week, the journalists will be posting a daily blog not just here, but also for free newspaper Metro. First to post a piece is Salamatu, on the contrasting experience of covering protests here in Edinburgh and back home in Sierra Leone.

Metro’s blog

And here’s a comment from ODI’s Peter Da Costa:

“A really brilliant idea! For better or for worse, a large number of commuters pick up Metro on the tube each morning. I was happy to read Ndesanjo’s piece this morning. This is probably the only year for as long as we will be able to remember that Africa will occupy so many column inches. So to have intelligent, perceptive comments from smart African journalists in the mainstream will at the very least send a clear message that Africa is anything but poor when it comes to ideas.”

Thanks!