Checkdesk: A digital newsroom where journalists and citizens work together

African News Innovation Challenge Update

Winners of $1m in Grants Focus on Citizen Engagement, Investigative Tools and Whistleblower Security

Checkdesk: A digital newsroom where journalists and citizens work together

12 Reblog VIEW ENTRY

Checkdesk: A digital newsroom where journalists and citizens work together

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Link journalists in North Africa with their community of readers via a collaborative, open source digital newsroom.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

Services Yahki, Storyful and Storify facilitate individual storytelling, but are hard to use collaboratively. Checkdesk helps journalists engage readers imaginatively in the reporting process using tasks, rewards and badges.

3. Describe the real world challenge that you are trying to solve for African media [50 words]

Citizens in post-revolution North Africa are crying out for opportunities to contribute and be heard. Reporting by citizens has broken through the sclerotic state media and provided an unprecedented plurality. But the region’s mainstream media are failing to harness this enthusiasm, engage citizen reporters, and provide coherence to the narrative.

4. How and why will your solution work? [100 words]

In prototype with Egyptian independent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm since 2011, Checkdesk is a participatory reporting platform where user content can be shared, embedded, enriched and promoted to an official liveblog. Last month, Al-Masry Al-Youm reported the elections using 2000+ citizen reports from 1000+ sources reaching more than 150,000 people. We now plan to build on Al-Masry Al-Youm’s 850,000+ Facebook likes to scale user participation with deep social network integration, mobile, task workflow for requests and rewards for active contributors. In doing so, we’ll help Al-Masry Al-Youm enrich its output, engage citizens in investigative reporting, and amplify their voices.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

Meedan is a nonprofit social technology company based in San Francisco. Our mission is to promote better collaboration and knowledge exchange through the social web, focused on the Arab world. We have a team spanning Cairo, Beirut, London, New York, Vancouver and San Francisco and have worked variously with the The Guardian, The Economist, University of Cambridge, QFI, and IIE. Al-Masry Al-Youm is a leading independent newspaper in Egypt and a regional pioneer in cross-platform news publishing, boasting an offline circulation of 1million+ daily copies, a Facebook page of 850,000+ likes, and a new television channel, Al-Masry Al-Youm TV.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

For the past year, Al-Masry Al-Youm and Meedan have been collaborating to prototype a participatory liveblogging platform for journalists to make better use of citizen media and engage audiences. Readers can post, markup and discuss newsworthy reports - such as tweets and YouTube videos - from any public site. These are embedded dynamically allowing journalists to quickly cross-reference the information contained and bundle multiple items into liveblog updates. In turn users develop profile scores showing how effective their content is. To scale, we need to improve performance, release for mobile, deepen Facebook integration and gamify the experience to reward uptake.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

The project has baseline funding from IPI, Sida and Arab Partnerships fund. Al-Masry Al-Youm is additionally rolling out advertising to develop revenue from the platform. However, we need to scale to achieve sustainability – which is why we are so interested in the expertise and accelerator support provided through ANIC.