>>Ahmed Shihab-Eldin: The Arab world has forever
changed, and so has the media.
Some would argue governance, as we've known
it, is also changing.
Business is certainly changing.
In fact, the whole world might be changing,
too.
The question is: Is social media the catalyst?
My simple answer is yes.
For just over the past year, I have been fortunate
enough to be immersed in a series of chaotic
and fateful events that have deprived me of
sleep, catapulted my career, but most importantly
connected me through social media at times
quite intimately to my shared generation of
Arab brothers and sisters fighting for the
right to self-determination.
After decades of oppression and dictatorship,
a revolutionary spirit led primarily by the
regions' youth and fueled by social media
has risen across the Middle East and North
Africa, challenging the governments in power,
the relationship with the West and the role
of religion, women and democracy and society.
It has also challenged, perhaps, unintentionally
the mainstream media.
Last fall, I had the privilege of speaking
at the Google Zeitgeist conference in Arizona
about Arabs reclaiming their identity and
essentially their right to self-determination.
But this certainly could not have been possible
without the use of social media and the relentless
pace of social media and the democratization
of media.
Social media, connected these young Arabs
to like-minded individuals like myself, some
in the media industry, across the region but
beyond.
Perhaps the most important connection was
with the media.
It eliminated the impulse of parachute journalism,
something on a personal note I find quite
offensive and tragic, if unavoidable.
And it's also as ineffective, I might add,
as it is costly.
What it did is it offered them a new source
for news gathering that President Bush once
famously, or infamously, called "the Internets."
But just as the Arab world is going through
a period of revolution, the media is also
undergoing a symbiotic revolution.
There has been much speculation, for example,
as to how central a role social media has
played in these revolutions.
At the beginning, Tunisia was called the Jasmine
Revolution or the Twitter Revolution.
But little has been discussed about its role
in another revolution, the media revolution.
Here is a quick anecdote.
Two nights ago, I was in my hotel room trying
to get my beauty sleep and basically I was
watching "Men in Black" on the obscenely large
television in my room -- I hope some of you
at least have a similar size TV because it's
quite a spectacle.
I watched photos of live streams of anti-war
protests clashing with police at the NATO
summit in Chicago.
It was streaming through my laptop, and within
minutes as I was tweeting, another live stream
emerged from Lebanon.
It popped into my Twitter feed, documenting
RPG and machine-gun fire that was sustained
for five hours.
This was the worst violence that Lebanon had
seen in perhaps over a decade.
There I was in my bed, aggregating tweets
and live video, calling up sources on the
ground, curating the story, using crowdsourced
Google Maps, basically using social media
as a news gathering tool and pushing it out
to my 12,000 Twitter followers in real time
in over 141 countries.
That, my friends, is the new age of journalism,
whether we're comfortable with it or not.
I stayed up till about 3:00 a.m., in somewhat
of a late-night menage a trois, except instead
of lovers, it was my laptop and my mobile
phone, of which I'm slightly embarrassed and
I'm definitely too in love with.
And seriously, on a side note, my family has
actually sat me down and had an intervention
about this, but that's another story altogether,
and I might discredit myself if I get into
it so I won't.
But for decades, on a serious note, leaders
in media and governments have championed the
ordinary citizen's right to information as
a fundamental human right, and for just as
long in the Arab world, citizens have been
denied and deprived this fundamental right.
50% of the world is under 30.
I'm included.
In the Arab world, it's 70%.
These young people have turned to the Internet
to engage with others, share grievances, and
mobilize to challenge the status quo.
Since then, we've seen this same spirit of
civic engagement spill from the virtual realm
into the streets, and as the Internet penetration
grew and the economic situation worsened,
millions of young unemployed but educated
youth acted out, including one notable man
in Tunisia, Mohammed Bouazizi, whose story
I'm sure you're all hopefully familiar with,
and if you're not, well, quite frankly, you
can Google it.
That same week, I had arrived to D.C. to launch
The Stream for Al Jazeera, an award-winning
interactive talk show that aimed to tap into
conversations that were very much already
happening on social media and leverage their
voices in order to report on underreported
stories.
I stumbled across the hashtag SidiBouzid which
was the town that Mohammed Bouazizi was from.
Immediately, I called up hundreds of photos
and videos showing student protests, police
abuses, sporadic gunfire, and within a matter
of minutes I was able to connect with a gentleman
on the ground named Ahmed.
I was Skyping with him.
He told me school was cancelled.
I asked him why and he sent me photos as well,
but he didn't seem to have an answer.
He said, "Because state TV said so."
And they didn't have an answer either.
I tried to look on the wires -- I really did
-- to corroborate the video as any journalist
might, to look for another source.
But there was nothing in the wires.
Absolutely nothing.
There I was, watching this horrible video
that he had sent me, of a guy's head, frankly,
being blown off, in a hospital somewhere near
Sidi Bouzid.
And I couldn't help but think to myself: Where
the hell is the media?
As the messages went viral, protests broke
out across the world showing solidarity with
what was happening in Tunisia -- in Geneva,
in Lausanne, in Egypt, in Algeria, Berlin,
and even London -- I realized the beginning
of a revolution was unfolding and, thanks
to social media, I had a front-row seat.
For more than a week, I watched the story
unfold, speaking to activists using Facebook,
Skype, Twitter, as protests turned bloody,
and it wasn't until January 12th, with Ben
Ali's regime on the verge of collapse that
Time magazine finally found the story.
Despite social media's challenging of the
state's intimidation and targeting of journalists
in Bahrain, Syria, and Egypt, many continued
to crack down on dissent, but through citizen
reporting and mobilization on social media,
their stories could simply not be suppressed.
Google, quite frankly, did not play a small
part, working with Twitter, collaborating
to launch Speak2Tweet, allowing voice messages
from mobile phones to be translated then into
tweets, to share information from the ground
in Egypt when Mubarak decided to shut off
the four ISP providers and essentially shut
down the Internet.
Still, according to Freedom House, overall
global freedom of the press did not decline
for the first time in eight years in the region,
and social media played a big part.
Now, I'm going to play a very short clip from
a show we did on The Stream that won a Royal
Television Society Award for innovative news
for its in-depth analysis of the ongoing struggle
in Bahrain.
Queue the video, please.
[ Video playing ]
>>Ahmed Shihab-Eldin: So the girl on Skype
that you saw in that interview is Zainab al-Khawaja.
She's the daughter of Abdel Hadi Khawaja,
the head of Bahrain's Center for Human Rights,
who was taken from his home in front of his
family, beaten, tortured, and put in prison.
He's been on hunger strike for over 80 days.
You may have noticed that she accused the
Crown Prince of Bahrain of torture.
I mean, think about that for a minute.
While this allegation was the first time it
was being made on international television,
she and thousands more had made it for months
on Twitter and Facebook with re-tweets, and
it's worth mentioning that the way I booked
her for the show is through Twitter.
Talk about changing methods in journalism.
So as she made these allegations, I literally
felt my heart skip a beat, because I was very
aware, as someone who is also Kuwaiti and
grew up in the region, the dangers that she
could put herself in.
And my producer apparently was also just as
aware.
Right when she spoke, he literally -- she,
rather -- fortunately she was a "she" -- she
said, "Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit,"
and this is what I'm hearing in my IFB.
Meanwhile, there's Twitter and I'm trying
to follow the tweets, and meanwhile I'm thinking
"Is this girl going to get killed?"
So I made it a point to say, "You know" -- right
before the show ended -- "we're going to be
following you on Twitter and, you know, we
just want to make sure that we continue this
story and tracking this story."
The reason being, it was an attempt by me
to just try and protect her, whether you think
that's acceptable in journalism or not.
The show included, just very quickly, two
guests on Skype, a Google Hangout with six
members from across the world, thousands on
Twitter tweeting in to challenge what was
being said by our studio guests.
That, to me, is the magic of social media.
Twitter alone has changed the way we as global
citizens -- forget journalists -- communicate
and the way wars are covered.
Especially when governments ban journalists
from entry to the country, Twitter ultimately
becomes the wires.
In this democratized media environment where
the authoritative is drowned out by the masses,
and immediacy and transparency trump objectivity,
videos documenting demolitions and disfigurements
expose enough in real time for us to grasp
the reality, based on sheer volume, even when
what we are seeing is not immediately verifiable.
Even if the face of a death toll reportedly
upwards of 12,000, potentially much higher
-- the Syrian government officials and Assad
supporters with whom I've spoken both on Al
Jazeera and off camera seem to echo one refrain
in their defense: Where is your proof?
Relating to the citizen journalism and the
videos.
When Syria refuses to allow journalists in
to cover the story, where does the burden
of truth or proof rest?
I'm sure my colleague, Paul Conroy, has a
fitting answer.
Does it rest with the activists who are documenting
destruction and sharing it with the world
through social media, or with the government
which is actively trying to shut the world
out and kill the story?
You can doubt the veracity of one video, 10
videos, perhaps, but can you doubt the veracity
of thousands of videos?
Every day while we were at The Stream, we
would sift through hundreds of videos that
were sent to us from all over the world, not
just the Arab world but specifically Bahrain,
where activists had set up webcams in Shi'a
villages to document police abuses, cops throwing
teargas into the roofs of homes killing people,
slashing tires, breaking car windows.
Al Jazeera was banned, journalists were detained,
but the pictures kept streaming through.
But rather than simply use their materials
to tell stories, we decided to open up the
editorial process.
We wanted to use Storify to help them tell
their own stories.
Let's just play that video quickly.
[ Video playing ]
>>Ahmed Shihab-Eldin: Now, I'm running short
on time so I might speak a little quickly
but the New York Times called our coverage
at Al Jazeera Al Jazeera's moment, but this
was not Al Jazeera's moment.
This was the people's moment.
Al Jazeera, like social media, played a crucial
role in amplifying and accelerating their
voices, connecting them with millions throughout
the region.
When I graduated from Columbia Journalism
School, I landed a job at the New York Times
producing the world page on their website.
I was 22 and the envy of some of my colleagues
who were double my age, but after six months
I quickly felt stifled.
It was too stiff, too arrogant, too old school,
frankly, for me, concerned with this false
sense of objectivity, and at the time it wasn't
innovative enough.
But back to today, a few months ago I resigned
from Al Jazeera because a truly disruptive
project came up that I couldn't turn down.
At Zeitgeist last year, I met Arianna Huffington
who went on stage right after my speech and
she started speaking of "the Ahmed model,"
which was new to me since I myself was not
familiar with my own model.
But the point being, the point being, we both
agreed that as journalists, we're humans.
We have emotions, we have morals, we have
values, and at least the aspirations of morality,
and that is what should matter in journalism.
Now, very quickly, fast-forward six months.
There I was in Vienna, giving my mom a foot
rub as any good Arab son might do.
I know we have an Arab over there so perhaps
he can relate.
And the phone rang.
It was Arianna.
And after a lengthy phone conversation, she
convinced me to be part of her new online
streaming network, an opportunity to take
what I had learned at The Stream and bring
it to the next level and then some.
Now, the project is called Huffpost Live and
it aims to really disrupt this TV media environment
that, quite frankly, is failing us.
And I say that humbly, hopefully not with
arrogance.
This summer it plans to launch.
It's going to be an online network that uses
the stories, the editors, the reporters, the
bloggers, and the commenters as its real-time
script.
It will be driven by the community and we
will be leveraging their voices, rather than
the same old talking heads that we're accustomed
to seeing on many TV networks.
Now, just to give you some quick perspective
on this, the Huffington Post which celebrated
its seven-year anniversary two weeks ago has
more unique page views and visitors than the
New York Times.
The New York Times is 161 years old and the
Huffington Post is 7 years old.
Now, if there's anything you remember from
my speech, it should be that the democratization
of the Arab world or any society is directly
related to the democratization of its media.
We must all recognize that collaboration should
trump competition, democratization should
trump authoritarianism.
It took us at the Huffington Post seven years
to get to 100 million comments.
Seven years, a hundred million comments.
In the last six months, we added 50 million
comments.
So the timing is now.
