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#Soicalmedia
#CitizenJustice
#Blacklivesmatter
#Stopthetunnles
#Standingrock
#Refugeeswelcomed
#Election2016
#TrumpOrClinton
#Bluelivesmatter
#Pipeline

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(Photo Courtesy of Erik McGregor© - February 29, 2016 - ResistAIM activists hard lock to blockade Spectra AIM Pipeline in Verplanck, NY #StopSpectra)

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(©nigrotime - Oct 29, 2015 - Healthcare professionals participated in a die-in near the United Nations to represent the nearly 700 medical professionals killed during the Syrian conflict.)

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(Photo Courtesy of Erik McGregor © - Marni Halasa founder of Revolution Is Sexy, a consulting service for activists and political groups on how to stage media-worthy protest.)

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(Photo Courtesy of Resa Del Sol© - February 17, 2013 - Over 40,000 marched on Washington, urging President Obama to take action against climate change and reject the Keystone XL Pipeline. The “elite media” all but ignored the march. )

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(Photo Courtesy of Jenna Pope© - August, 2012 - Republican National Convention, Tampa, Florida)

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the freedom of press is needed.

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do something.

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Six corporate leviathans stand right on top of mainstream media's metaphorical garden hose, and by simply shifting their bloat about, control the flow of information that most Americans read, watch and hear. These giants' names are Viacom, CBS, Comcast, Newscorp, Disney and Time Warner. They were created in great part by, but with no thanks at all to, Bill Clinton, who deregulated the FCC, in 1996.

In the simplest meme-worthy of terms, there are 1500 newspapers, 1100 magazines, 9000 radio stations, 1500 TV stations and 2400 publishers. This is how 90% of all information flows to us - via six corporate conduits.

Of course this is not breaking news. Many have written extensively on this corporate consolidation, on how these six companies dictate which images hit our retinas and control what news is fit to print (or broadcast).

( Photo Courtesy of Jenna Pope© - August, 2012 - Republican National Convention, Tampa, Florida)

"Elite media covers elite power," Phil Donahue told me during an interview in 2013. "You don't see many dissenting voices on Meet the Press. And that's an important side of our national dialogue that's never heard."

The consequence of this type of selective reporting exposes the cherry picking nature of "elite media" but also reveals something more significant.

And it is this: people are committing acts of citizen journalism.

From the denizens trapped in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina who sent out dispatches, to Sarah Koenig's Serial podcasts, to Glenn Greenwald's and Laura Poitris' reporting on the NSA's program of mass surveillance, independent and citizen journalists are the engines of investigation, the generators of content, the creators of images, the hub of All The News They Didn't, Can't or Won't Print.

( Photo Courtesy of Erik McGregor© - February 29, 2016 - ResistAIM activists hard lock to blockade Spectra AIM Pipeline in Verplanck, NY #StopSpectra)

Having witnessed the news of their lives being dismissed or ignored, more and more people have put their bodies on the line, their ink on the page and their images on the web. With defiance, tenacity and boots-on-the-ground bravery - and often with little or no financial backing - independent and citizen journalists are utilizing tools of the digital age to change the conversation at a grassroots level.

In New York alone I have admired and/or worked along side with self-publishers and multi-platform broadcasters (Dennis Trainer of Acronym TV, Mark Apollo of Occupy Weekly News, Vlad Teichberg of GlobalRevLive), video journalists and livestreamers ( James Woods and Matt Hopard, Rob Brune), filmmakers, artists and radio/podcasters, (Messiah Rhodes, Sarah Wellington, Laurie Arbeiter, Marni Halasa, Katie Klabusich,) a bevy of photo journalists ( Erik R. McGregor, Jenna Pope, Andrew Katz, Cindy Trinh, Charles Meacham, Edward Leavy Jr, Resa Del Sol, Jeff Rae, Louis Mazzei and Angel Zayas), and organizers and writers ( Linda Sarsour, Jerry Ashton, Andy Worthington, Justin Wedes, Medea Benjamin), all of whom have invested their time, money and talent to champion underreported issues but, also, through their work, challenge the myopic news narratives of the "elite media."

The message being: I dare you to ignore this further.

( Photo Courtesy of Erik McGregor© - Dec 18, 2015 - Actor James Cromwell locking necks to Actress Madeleine Shaw and Pramilla Malick in order to block the entrance of the entrance to the CPV Power Plant construction site. )

Think back to even just a few years ago when issues like income inequality, divestment from fossil fuels, student debt, the prison industrial complex, global warming and Black Lives Matter were barely a sound bite within the national dialogue. The trees were, in fact, falling in the forest but it is thanks to independent and citizen journalists that the public actually heard the sound.

Take, for instance, the fight for a $15 minimum wage, which began in New York City in 2012 with merely a few dozen protesters taking to the streets. It was through a grassroots media campaign that cultivated what it has become today - an international movement.

( ©nigrotime - April 15, 2015 - Fast food workers went on strike in over 200 cities. In NYC thousands marched down Broadway)

The same can be said for the fight to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline, where back in 2010 the tar sands tube-of-destruction was all but fait accompli. After dozens of independently generated stories flooded the portals of communication, and then a citizen groundswell that marshaled 100,000 people to sign up and risk arrest if Obama didn't change his mind, mainstream media had to take their earplugs out and blinders off. As of 2015, the project is effectively dead (though resuscitative gambits are in the offing).

( Photo Courtesy of Resa Del Sol© - February 17, 2013 - Over 40,000 marched on Washington, urging President Obama to take action against climate change and reject the Keystone XL Pipeline. The "elite media" all but ignored the march. )

Or, the on-going Monday night actions of NYC Shut It Down, a group who has gathered at Grand Central Station for over a year now to remember and protest in honor of a different victim of police brutality, demanding an end to unaccountable police violence occurring across America (tirelessly documented by Keegan Stephan, and others -- #PeoplesMonday).

( Video Courtesy of Keegan Stephan©)

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Chris Hedges, who featured Phil Donahue in his piece The Day That TV News Died, hammered at the plight of mainstream journalism, writing that, "They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed."

Is it then up to citizen journalists to make sure that the news of our lives is newsworthy? Often, this is the case. Without coverage and reporting by independent and citizen journalists there is little to debate if these abovementioned issues would have gotten the nationwide coverage, let alone achieved even a modicum of change.

Just like the Flint Water Crisis -- where it took an independent journalist to expose the criminal evolution and subsequent health horror that is happening there now -- another investigative story, which I am peripherally tethered, was just published on the website Hundred Eighty Degrees, by another citizen journalist, a colleague, Doug Forbes.

( ©nigrotime - February 21, 2016 - NYC to Flint Solidarity March, Harlem, New York)

Doug's story is the result of a four-month investigation that examines and calls into question "fraudulent business practices of Gravity Payments," the Seattle-based credit card processing company that garnered international acclaim after its CEO Dan Price announced a $70,000 minimum salary of every employee. (Note: my affiliation with this piece stems from my advocacy for the Fight for $15 movement, which is explained within Part One of the report).

Now, don't glaze over the credit card processing topic quite so fast. It's a juggernaut of investigative journalism that details a scheme in the hundreds of millions of dollars, involves some of the nation's biggest finance brands and potentially jeopardizes thousands of small business and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Similar to Curt Guyette's reportage of Flint, whereby it took months and months of work before the established outlets relinquished corporate column space, Doug Forbes' self-funded story is seemingly on a similar trajectory, as follow-up coverage is beginning to pop up across various media platforms, ( Entrepreneur, Geek Wire, and the San Francisco Gate).

Beyond the far-reaching economic significance of the Gravity Payments story, however, is the fact that within his four-part piece, Forbes also indicts the "elite media." News sources the world over, according to Forbes, anointed the Seattle CEO (either positively or pejoratively) as this celebrity corporate Jesus figure without ever executing the most rudimentary of fact checks.

( Photo Courtesy of Erik McGregor © - Marni Halasa founder of Revolution Is Sexy, a consulting service for activists and political groups on how to stage media-worthy protest.)

Those who lionized Price utterly "Lance-Armstronged" the story; they rolled up their sleeve, got injected with his dope and then peddled every fractured fairytale as fact. Those who vilified Price as a socialist-communist-idiot-idealist-who-thinks- he-can-walk-on-the-water-and-swim-on-the-land strangely didn't bother vetting him either. Even a modicum of due diligence, as Forbes' story asserts, would have revealed that Price had been crucifying his clients.

Citizen journalism, to be sure, is a dynamic way of saying to the "elite media" do your job, without actually saying, do your job. In Forbes' case, however, he not only came out and said to global media outlets, including the New York Times, NBC and Bloomberg Businessweek, you did a bad job, but he's relentlessly holding them accountable for continuing to sit on their hands.

And therein lingers the conundrum of citizen journalism: we report, write, blog, shoot and post our work to expose stories that the "elite media" dismisses, but secretly (or, perhaps not so secretly) we're also hoping to garner some exposure from them.

( ©nigrotime - Oct 29, 2015 - Healthcare professionals participated in a die-in near the United Nations to represent the nearly 700 medical professionals killed during the Syrian conflict.)

Because this is what citizen journalists want, right? Exposure. Exposure of their work, exposure of the truths that they had investigated, witnessed and disseminated to the world because no one else was doing it.

In other words, traction. And without traction, these stories fall into an abyss. (The fight to create awareness around the Trans-Pacific Partnership is one story that journalists/activists like Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers and Adam Weissman have been doggedly writing about, trying to expose a "free trade" deal that would, in the broadest of terms, embed corporate power into every area of our lives).

To be fair, the "elite media" wants traction just as much. The difference between the "fourth estate" and the "citizen collective," however, is that the corporate media is monetarily driven with millions of people already transfixed with a front row seat, while citizen journalism, at its core, is advocacy based and essentially handing out comp tickets to a band that few have listened to let alone heard of.

( Photo Courtesy of Angel Zayas© - October 24, 2016 - "The police would rather start fights with celebrities than examine why the public has lost trust in them." --Quentin Tarantino #RiseUpOctober)

Independent journalists want their audience (as paltry as it sometimes may be) to re-act and then perhaps take action. Any action. Even a "click," a "like" or a "share" can become the mechanism by which the "elite media" will no longer be able to ignore.

Some criticize citizen journalists who attempt to garner validation from within the fortified walls of the fourth estate as vainglorious. But validation is not the point. Reaching and preaching beyond the choir is. Reporting for a citizen journalist comes from a place, I believe, of moral obligation; it is a way to give voice to those who are being ignored or silenced.

And that is the power of citizen journalism. If a story gains traction, if it reaches a point of critical mass, creates a fiscal scenario palatable to "elite media" outlets, then they allocate resources and, hopefully, do their job. This doesn't mean they won't spin it, but at least the breadcrumb trail of truth has the potential of being honored.

( Side note: This doesn't mean that we, as citizen journalists, should give our work away for free, especially when the "elite media" requests to use, say, a photo for a mere credit on the mainstream evening news. But choose your battles. Just because they didn't "get the shot" or "investigate the piece" or do their job does not mean they can abuse the actual worker, the actual journalist).

( Photo Courtesy of Jenna Pope© - July 25, 2015 - A pro-Palestinian activist being arrested during a die-in outside of IDB Bank in NYC)

Take the parody edition of The New York Times that was handed out on February 2, 2016 in New York City, by the two groups Jewish Voices For Peace and Jews Say No! In a press release the day after 10,000 copies were distributed (and more downloaded online) Beth Miller of JVP said,

"Our paper gave voice to stories and facts that are left out of The Times. Like our "Corrections" section, where we printed the names of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces over the last few months - names that had never appeared in the paper."

Parody, in this case, is a bit of a miscatgorization because within their edition were researched and verified stories - in other words, they printed news.

Why is exposure for citizen journalists so difficult? Perhaps the answer is tangled somewhere within the mechanism of the 24-hour news cycle.

For journalists like Glenn Greenwald (who has always worked independently) and Curt Guyette (recently honored by the Michigan Press Association as "Journalist of the Year") and Doug Forbes (who spent months researching and digging) it is their patience that became the necessary imperative that freed them to report.

Patience doesn't exist inside the 24-hour news cycle. Why? Money. The "elite media" need stories to pay the bills every hour, on the hour, every day.

Much like the children's story where the dog chases the cat that chases the mouse that chases etc., etc... The cyclical nature of how money has compromised the breadth and scope of reporting is rather easy to follow.

The money, which comes from advertisers, fuels corporations who employ lobbyists that enact policy channeled through the FCC, which is run by, you guessed it, the six corporate leviathans. Wash, rinse, repeat.

( l-r. ©nigrotime - Feb. 17,2013 - Retired Philadelphia Police Department Capt. Ray Lewis at the Forward on Climate Protest. ©Jenna Pope - September 22, 2014 - Flood Wall Street action: Thousands of protesters carried their message to the Wall Street bankers who bankroll climate change)

How, then, does one enter the conversation so that those within the powerful walls of the fourth estate listen? We can't. Small voices will not be heard in big places. But we can have an immense impact if we continue to do it collectively.

Independent and citizen journalism are the fertile landscape from where the corporate media should be pressured to harvest their material. The less they report on our real lives, the more important it is to lard the system with our words and images, to aggregate each other's work and to continue committing acts of citizen journalism.

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Let's All Commit Acts of Citizen Journalism

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Six corporate leviathans stand right on top of mainstream media's metaphorical garden hose, and by simply shifting their bloat about, control the flow of information that most Americans read, watch and hear. These giants' names are Viacom, CBS, Comcast, Newscorp, Disney and Time Warner.

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w/ video.

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Abraham Zapruder and George Holliday were two normal American citizens with home video cameras. Just two guys who changed the nature of how the world consumes news.

Zapruder, a woman's clothing manufacturer, captured the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy and started a fierce bidding war for the footage. Holliday, a manager at a plumbing and rooting company, fired up his Sony Handycam on March 3, 1991 to record four Los Angeles policemen brutally beating up Rodney King. Both clips shocked the planet.

Feidin Santana and Kevin Moore are two normal American citizens with home video cameras, two more guys to change the world. On April 4, Santana recorded a former South Carolina policeman shooting and killing the unarmed Michael Scott. Moore recorded Freddie Gray requesting medical attention in mid-April while under police custody - and being ignored hours before he died in the custody of Baltimore policemen.

It would take days for the Zapruder and Holliday clips to be released to the public through news outlets. Today, that delay is essentially zero.

In a world where cameras are everywhere, the truth is accessible to more people. Does a modern news agency inform citizens by relying on citizen journalists?

Technology Transformation

"There's nothing quite like live video to put people in the moment when it comes to breaking news." - Josh Stearns, who follows citizen journalism at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Citizen journalism dates back to the 18th century, when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay disseminated information on the U.S. Constitution in the Federalist Papers. Then this thing called the Internet appeared, and now anyone with a cellphone can live-stream breaking news events as simply as taking a selfie. To spread news of unreported disappearances in Iraq in 2003, all that an architect calling himself "Salam Pax" needed was a blog. Add YouTube to the mix and citizen journalists have something uniquely modern: self-distribution to millions with complete content control.

In a world where cameras are everywhere, the truth is accessible to more people.

This basic shift has massive repercussions for newsrooms. In May of last year, the Chicago Sun-Times fired its entire staff of full-time photographers, claiming in a press release that the paper's audience was "seeking more video content with their news." The very next day, the paper mandated that its reporters partake in "iPhone photography basics." Lorainne Branham, dean of Syracuse University's award-winning Newhouse School of communication, told Digital Trends this shift in the industry is reflected in how future journalists are taught.

"Social media is a part of the journalism landscape right now," Branham said. "We teach our students how to utilize social media, how to use Facebook to gather information, how to get sources, how to tweet information out." Slowly, professional journalists are employing the same fact gathering tactics as pre-teens.

Benefits of Citizen Journalism

Live news is delayed in order to censor cursing, but a well known secret about the news is that there's a more natural delay to live TV. "Network guys get to events later than they happen," Ford Fischer, co-founder of independent news organization News2Share, told Digital Trends. "So [citizens] are filming when something crazy is happening in front of them." News2Share was started in late August 2013 by Fischer and American University schoolmate Trey Yingst, a broadcast journalism graduate. The pair accept videos from citizens and recently received combat footage via Facebook of the Peshmerga army fighting ISIS in Iraq and being shot at by Kurdish soldiers.

Simple math. There are more civilians than journalists. More civilian journalists mean more eyes searching for a story.

From Rodney King in the late 80s to Walter Scott earlier this year, citizen journalism has helped expose police brutality. As a result, police transparency has been a focal point in the Obama administration as they and the Department of Justice both announced separate plans to fund the acquisition by numerous police departments of tens of thousands of body cameras. TASER International - body camera provider for 98 percent of police departments using the technology - informed Digital Trends that government dollars may not actually arrive until 2016. "The money will have to be new money, and that's always a challenge - especially as the law enforcement grants keep getting smaller for other necessary equipment." Body cameras may improve clarity in some situations, but they do not fundamentally preclude misinformation; public release of the footage depends on each individual police department. For example, District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed the exemption of body camera footage from the Freedom of Information Act, and D.C. police are already planning to limit who sees the footage.

Citizen journalists don't just get to where professional journalists can't go, they get to places professional journalists won't go.

Given the uncertainties surrounding body camera footage, citizen journalists could be a necessary circumvention to such policies, as they can get access to places most journalists can not. "The guys with big network type cameras, in particular when [protesters] can see what brand they are - CNN, Fox, or whatever - those guys tend to get assaulted," Fischer said. It may be a bit easier for the average citizen to blend in with a mob than Don Lemon.

Citizen journalists don't just get to where professional journalists can't go, they get to places professional journalists won't go. Branham attributes layoffs and downsizing to why news organizations aren't covering local communities the way they used to. "Part of the criticism you hear about the media from some of these communities is that 'you're not telling our stories' or 'you only report about the negative stuff,'" she said.

Ashley Kang, a graduate of Newhouse, is the director of an community newspaper called The Stand which pairs members of the Syracuse community with college students to work on news reporting. "When we pair residents with students, residents know the neighborhood," Kang remarked. "They know all the people you should talk to and then the student can quickly pull information."

Pitfalls of Citizen Journalism

Spreading the truth through rogue Periscopers can prove efficient, but costly in the grand scheme.

Kang says new citizen journalists at The Stand have had trouble interviewing subjects and executing ideas; they need proper guidance. Dean Branham feels this is a central problem to the idea of calling people "journalists" simply because they've filmed an event.

"Usually when people are out there capturing something on video, they're capturing a moment in time of what happened and they're not attempting to put it into context," she explained. Someone could live stream a suicide attempt and have no means of redacting the faces of innocent bystanders, or they may have no qualms with capturing the actual suicide - measures taken by professional journalists.

Everyone has some sort of prejudice, but professional journalists are taught to disavow that and under every circumstance provide objectivity. The part-time worker who wants to make a quick buck by filming cop arrests has no incentive or training to abide by ethics. "The company could send their own person [to an event] trying to promote a product," Kang theorizes. With newsroom-downsizing leaving less time dedicated to editorial oversight, abuses to a system that takes the juiciest stories from untrained journalists could be quite easy and rampant. If an esteemed journalist such as Brian Williams can pass off false memories of combat as truth, an impressionable citizen could do worse without the right guidance and structure.
Efforts to Help and Work with Citizen Journalism
MediaQ is one of the few initiatives with the infrastructure to reduce abuses to a citizen journalism/news outlet system. MediaQ is an online media management platform started by the University of Southern California's (USC) Integrated Media Systems Center; it collects user-generated content for sharing among registered members. When a citizen records and uploads a video to MediaQ, the location and viewing direction of the video is automatically added. A news organization could also send out a request on MediaQ for footage of a certain event. For example, NBC could send an alert for footage of a robbery that they may not have a reporter nearby for. MediaQ and any citizen journalist registered in the system near the specified location will receive that notification.

There are YouTube tutorials and idiot guides to learn how to be a journalist, but humans are still the best training resource. Kang and The Stand hold full-day mentorship workshops where community members are paired with journalism graduate students who help them source, interview and edit their articles. The students end the day with their article posted online, a move Kang admits "kind of motivated people more, got them more interested." When The Stand launched in late 2009, an early goal was for it to be financially stable enough for it to be solely run by community residents. Kang told Digital Trends that The Stand's board members begun discussing this proposition and looking to secure more grants and advertisers earlier this year.

In an age where nearly one-third of U.S. adults receive their news from Facebook, the paper is the last place we look for timely information.

The Baltimore Sun created an interactive timeline of the incidents leading to Freddie Gray's death. Each point in time is accompanied with a description of the events described by the police reports and official statements as well as video testimonials and amateur footage of Baltimore residents who witnessed the ordeal. NBC News dedicated a section of its news to citizen journalism in 2005. Eight years later, the company purchased user-generated live video service Stringwire, and last year used the service to post exclusive user-generated footage of the Ferguson protests. With police officers on film tampering with crime scenesas evidenced in the shooting of Walter Scott, the NSA illegally collecting all of our phone data and mainstream news outlets seemingly limited by their proximity and access, now is as good as anytime to expand journalism's reach.

YouTube and social media news agency Storyful recently partnered for YouTube Newswire, a YouTube channel of verified eyewitness videos. The videos are separated by the news they capture and are a mix of amateur and professionally shot videos. Parts of Oklahoma and Texas were hit with eight to nine inches of rain and flash flooding on Wednesday and within hours YouTube Newswire organized a collection of amateur videos of the flooding from inside cars, homes and even roofs. YouTube has also launched First Draft Coalition, a group of "thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism" providing journalists with advice on the ethics and practices of handling citizen-shot footage. We have reached a point where journalism needs to learn from the people it reports.

The news moves quickly. In an age where nearly one-third of U.S. adults receive their news from Facebook, the paper is the last place we look for timely information. You are the Feidin Santana. You are CNN. You are NBC. You are Kevin Moore.

You are the news. Report responsibly.

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The citizen journalist: How ordinary people are taking control of the news

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Abraham Zapruder and George Holliday were two normal American citizens with home video cameras. Just two guys who changed the nature of how the world consumes news. Zapruder, a woman's clothing manufacturer, captured the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy and started a fierce bidding war for the footage.

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"you don't have to be political. All you need is a smart phone."

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In a digital world with a whole host of different ways to communicate a factual message it is increasingly hard to judge the value of amateur eyewitness film shot on a mobile phone and posted on the internet against a considered, observational documentary broadcast on a traditional television channel.

From the Occupy New York City bloggers, such as Tim Pool who has broadcast hours and hours of live reports from Zucotti Park in the city, to YouTube videos of citizens under fire from government forces in Syria - these incidents and more are changing the landscape of documentary filmmaking. This has been made possible by the technology they use, the distribution platforms that are now available and the passion of ordinary men and women to tell the kinds of extraordinary stories that were once the domain of professional documentary makers.

Factual filmmaking has in some senses become hostage to these new, "immediate" technologies. But many working in the genre praise the developments for adding a richer dimension to current affairs and factual documentaries and everyone seems to agree that the genre will never be the same again.

"Phone cameras and internet video must threaten broadcasters who think TV viewers will move away from them (and on to the web), but the collective arena is a hive of creativity," says documentary pioneer Molly Dineen. "It should add to what traditional documentary makers are doing and not take away."

Roger Graef, award-winning filmmaker and founder of Films of Record, talks with enthusiasm about being able to source and use footage from social networks and YouTube to supplement what he shoots himself. In his film The Trouble with Pirates for Channel 4, Graef used "home video" footage shot by pirates and captives, material that he "wouldn't have gotten any other way" and that he says "made the film". But he also underlines the risks. "There are two big downsides to 'found' video: the first is provenance; it takes money and time to check that it is real and not faked; the second risk is that just because you can shoot on a camera phone doesn't mean you should. I worry that commissioners will use this as an excuse to cut budgets for factual even further."

UKTV's general manager factual, Adrian Wills, says citizen journalists' footage and social media doesn't impact his programming but he concedes it is an increasingly important marketing tool. "Natural history and science is, I think, a different beast completely from current affairs programmes. Digital activity has found traction in reaction to news events and for live especially. I think for us the digital stuff is really about amplification around what we are doing already."

But current affairs is clearly benefiting from citizen journalism and video testimony from ordinary citizens. "Social networks are opening up whole new vistas for documentary filmmakers," enthuses Chris Shaw, editorial director ITN Productions. "You can make the most amazing films using content from social networks, sometimes with the permission and sometimes without the permission of the people who shot them."

Shaw says that ITN's documentary, Syria's Torture Machine, for Channel 4, drew on about 30,000 clips that have been uploaded on various social network sites, including "trophy videos" from Syrian military torturers and footage from local families and citizens caught up in demonstrations. "I think there is a sense that objective journalism is not the same as trawling social networks for citizen reportage and imagery, but there are two problems with that view," says Shaw. "First there are places like Syria where journalists haven't been able to go and second there is an extraordinary resource on social networks for current affairs, even though we have to take extraordinary caution to verify what we use."

In Shaw's view, the way forward is to mix "citizen video" with professionally shot footage to come up with a more rounded picture. "It's a whole new force of amazing, raw and close-to-the action footage and there is a lot more of it," says Shaw. "In the old days we would find one image of someone's feet being beaten with a cable, but now we get 20 of them. Although it is disturbing, we can begin to see patterns and to build a better picture of the scale of abuse - and that has got to be a good thing for the film."

"The new technologies certainly open up new possibilities for filmmaking", says Jeff Deutchman, whose documentary of the day after Barak Obama was elected US president called 11/4/08 used crowd-sourced footage. "What's interesting about what I did is that it is fundamentally oppositional not only to traditional documentaries but also to traditional ideas of filmmaking that most of us have internalised, like filmmaking is about a top-down structure where the director is in control. But the truth is there is something really interesting about the level of democracy involved in using crowd-sourced footage."

Deutchman, who also is director of acquisitions and productions for Sundance Selects/IFC Films, thinks that there are even more radical things to come as people figure out how to use the technology available to create new and different things. "I don't know if all this experimentation will lead to better films, but I do think they can be extended to get some truly radical process like where users are able to edit their own films perhaps. I think there is much more to explore."

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From live blogs on 'Occupy' protests to footage of Syrian atrocities on YouTube, filmmakers now have access to a wealth of raw material - but can it all be trusted? Kate Bulkley reports

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its not just our community its the world

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Citizen Journalism: A Tool Of Justice | shift | msnbc

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Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, Executive Director of Witness, and Marooj Alwazir, co-founder of SupportYemen talk about how citizen journalism can shed light on an event that otherwise wouldn't have been documented. " Subscribe to msnbc: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc About: msnbc is the premier destination for in-depth analysis of daily headlines, insightful political commentary and informed perspectives.

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"Anyone could be a journalist "