Interview With Demotix – Part 1

Crowd-sourcing news and citizen journalism outlets are on the rise. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Turi Munthe, CEO of the ‘citizen wire’ start-up Demotix about the future of reporting and social media’s place in journalism...

Appfrica: What is Demotix and how did it come about?

Turi Menthe: Remember all those pictures of the London bombings, of the Tsunami, of the monks in Burma? They were all taken by people who just happened to be there at the time and managed to snap a picture with their mobile phone or a camera. They are what we call ‘street journalists’.

What we do is to take those pictures and videos and host them. And then we take those images and videos and pump them out to the traditional media (newspapers, magazines, TV channels, news programes, etc…).

Demotix is a ‘Street Wire’. It began when I discovered that citizen journalism existed. Within about a day, I realized that it was probably Freedom of Speech’s greatest weapon, AND that – done properly – it could save the traditional media (which is shedding reporters, editors, photographers and professionals of all sorts at the speed of summer lightning) from itself. That was about a year ago.

A: So, in some ways a service like Demotix is similar to the AP, instead of  a finite number of professionals you have an unlimited number of amateur photographers.  Is there standard for who can contribute, like type of camera?

TM: Not at all! We’ll publish anything that counts as news. HD video just like camera-phone snaps. If it’s news, we want it and we can do something with it.

A: What’s the name all about?

TM: Demos is the word for ‘the people’ in ancient Greek. Demotic Greek was the language of the people ^[1], the vernacular; and the same word is used for vernacular Egyptian ^[2]. Essentially, it’s the language of men and woman in the street. And that is precisely what DEMOTIX is trying to represent to the world.

A: There’s been a lot of ‘crowd-sourcing’ happening with the web as of late and the major news organizations seem to be just catching on.  CNN has its I-Reporters and other networks are experimenting with citizen bloggers.  What do you think journalism will look like five years from now as a result?

TM: I’m not sure whether you have had the chance to take a look at our blog which looks into this, but I think you’re hitting the nail bang on the head. What is happening is fairly simple and fairly terrible: at our most ‘globalized’, the news space is shrinking daily. If you check the stats on the blog above, you’ll see what I mean…

Demotix began because I felt, and feel, that ‘citizen journalism’ HAS to be drafted in to save the traditional media from its big-business concerns, and its ever shrinking advertising revenues…
My view is that – for the time being while we all learn how to do ‘street journalism’ (which is the term we use) it can step into the void left by cutbacks and supplement the mainstream media’s work. Later down the line, I think true street journalism will be able to stand alone. Nothing monitors itself more closely than a community. Aristotle said it first. Villages and tribes and political parties having been doing it since before he said it. And then Wikipedia came along and proved to the world that the same principle worked for the www.

A: Do you think more and more opportunities will arise for ‘citizen photo-journalists’ to participate with mainstream media?

TM: Absolutely. The critical issue is how those relationships are managed. Can those images be found quickly and efficiently? Can they be generated in the same way? Etc… that’s precisely where Demotix is trying to work.

A: The media gets accused of being biased but there’s a danger that certain sections of the public are even more biased and extreme in their opinions and beliefs.  Is it hard to find a balance between the people who use your service to simply contribute content and the people who are actively promoting an agenda?

TM: Our view at the moment is that the more ‘agenda’-based fighting takes place on the web, the bigger and better the conversations become. We want everyone representing themselves on Demotix, and fighting their corner as and when necessary – because we certainly don’t claim to represent any one opinion or angle on the site.

The critical issue for us is not ‘agenda’-setting, but making sure we’re only reporting facts. If – say – it serves a particular Kurdish faction to highlight the abuses of the Iranian government, but those abuses took place, who cares whether they profit by it politically.

A: When you look at maps of which countries are connected and which ones aren’t, you start to realize that the majority of people on the planet aren’t using the internet at all.  At least not in any productive manner simply because they don’t have affordable access. As more and more of these people come online do you think things will shift quite a bit?  Things like the types of stories being documented?

TM: I’m banking on it. In fact, one of the true positives about technological developments over the past few years is the fact that the developing world is almost leapfrogging ‘modernity’. They don’t need fibre optic cable and electricity pumping around the village 24 hrs/day, because their cell phones increasingly give them access to the world via satellite. I’ve spent long periods of time in deepest West Africa – away from the towns, away from the roads, and everything is done via mobile – from business through to political campaigning.

A: Your site seems to be built in Drupal with a lot of Javascript and Jquery modifications.  What was behind that decision?

TM: We love Open Source. It’s where we live conceptually. And Drupal is Opensource – collaborative, collective, participatory, and aimed at the common good – down to its very core. Which is exactly what Demotix hopes to be.

Continued in Part 2…