Moeed Ahmad brings a very welcome perspective from the Arabic speaking world at Al-Jazeera. To set the context for his talk, he quotes Lawrence Lessig’s comments to Al Jazeera 3 years ago, the New Media Department was formed under that influence. (lessig.org) Lessig encouraged Al-Jazeera to enter the US market by espousing the values that the USA espoused better than the US themselves. By this, he was referring the the freedom to use content under Creative Commons licences, instead of restrictive copyright. Al-Jazeera definitely took this lesson to heart as Moeed demonstrates in this talk. The open-ness of the creative commons movement is underlies the intiatives he mentions, and shows how this can be empowered by Moeed’s own bosses and empower causes and the values of journalistic integrity that Moeed consistently makes references to.
The overall approach:
Al Jazeera has decided to put all their content for free on youTube to form a ‘virtuous cycle’ where Al-Jazzera content in available to all, and users can make their own content and return it ‘not as criminal act, but as an act of love’ for the content. Users act as marketers for Al-Jazeera’s own content. The exposure to social media is really to be where the discussions are happening and where the content is consumed.
Project Examples:
The Al Jazeera Creative Commons repository.
Al Jazeera has made creative commons as part of a management and strategic philosophy. Only Al-Jazeera had content from Gaza as they had their own reporters on the ground, and could get reports out of Gaza under an Israeli government ban. Instead of enforcing this scarcity and charging other media companies high prices for it. They put it out for free and under a creative commons licence.
After that, much leads were generated because other media agencies thought ‘this was good news, can we have more’ and Al-Jazeera sold daily round-up packages to people who had taken the Gaza content for free.
War 2.0
Israeli perspective on the war. Palestinian view of the war. Both sides are pulling the discussion from social networking sites. Al Jazeera made a twitter identity @ajgaza a special topic based twitter feed and gave minute by minute updates on it. Much mileage from retweets, and they brought this feed onto their English service to much popularity
A location mash-up to track fighting in Gaza, gives new context to the violence in the middle east, showing how this related to people on the ground. (This reminds me of the chicago police+ google maps mash up which Adrian Holovaty talked about earlier today. Giving context through mashing up content. )
Al-Jazeera also looked at how reliable tracked the number of twitter accounts from Tehran 60 accounts before the crisis to 6 during the crisis. Moeed noted a relationship in social media from that:
info – noise + context = news
Tags: al jazeera, creative commons, keynote spea, media 2010
