My point for exposing myself is because recently, I’ve been chatting with some of my mates, who happen to be former journalist. From all the philosophies we managed to share, I’ve realised that it will take years for media workers to acknowledge that citizen journalism is an ideology playing out in the media sphere. For now, I’ll point fear as the culprit for the uncertainties my colleagues often display when citizen media pops up.

Journalists are clearly still sceptical of what citizens can produce. The citizens’ integrity when reporting is often questioned and journalists are quick to jump the gun that they are inadequately trained about media principles and ethics. And so, they cannot report news with the same integrity, objectivity, fairness and truthfulness essential as reporting protocols. Even digital media is lambasted by some, who would rather prefer their tradition newspaper sold at street corners. Digital media is another agenda for another day and I won’t digress.

Websites such as Ushahidi.com and OhmyNews international are defining the trends of citizen reporting. They are indicators that with the right resources, citizen media can be realised in our media and social spheres.

Now when I talk about resources, I’m not turning to mobile phones and internet resources and infrastrures. I’m simply referring to training institutions which can accelerate the maturity of citizen media.

Take a look at reporter.co.za, the first website to allow citizens to write stories as they see them. The initiative is the brainchild of media company, Avusa media (former Johnnic communications). The company took the task of providing the training and mentoring to the citizen journalist who form part of the website network. 20 journalists from the company who are skilled in different areas facilitate the mentoring of the citizens, who send in stories that are of particular interest to them and their communities.

Since its inception a few years ago, it has become a major success, because it has managed to provide professional journalism training and tools of modern technology to ordinary citizens.

Now rhetorical explanations such as inadequate training of citizens in reporting are rather irrelevant, if for development’s sakes, mainstream media companies could lend their resources for the training of citizens. And I’m not suggesting for a Take a Citizen Journalist to Work initiative! Although it might work…

Instead of being reclusive behind old communication models and being sceptical of change and developments in new forms of telling news, media companies should rather make available resources which could do some justice to citizens who want to tell their stories.

Though, I must say that being part of the mobile active 08 conference last week in Johannesburg opened my eyes to a thriving mobile world out there.

For one, I had to overcome my fear of technology in one day by using a mobile phone as a reporting tool. As if my personal phone is not giving me enough headaches already. I could have been warned earlier about this. Well to be quite frank, the little gadget I had to use was higher grade for me. From the applications to use to Twitter, download and upload pictures and videos to the features of the actual phone.  And I thought technology was meant to make ones life easy.

But by day two, I was thinking that this is actually not bad at all once you get the grip on it. Considering that lobby groups such as Greenpeace have taken activism literally to their hands on mobile phones, there is certainly some social good coming out of these devices.

Nonetheless, I managed to put together a vlog (watch vlog) based on a presentation on mobiles and citizen media using this phone.

My talk with Juliana Rotich from Global Voices, an online citizen media initiative that gives citizens from across the globe a voice, exposed me to another perspective of citizen media that I was not aware of.

Well not that I’m ignorant, but I was not aware of cases where mobile phones have evidently empowered citizen journalists, especially in Africa.

During the conference, I listened to Rotich’s presentation on Ushahidi.com, a website which was initiated to map the violence in Kenya that broke out post the elections fallout  earlier this year. It’s a simple website that uses user-generated reports and Google maps to gather citizen generated crisis information. Citizens can send information via email, web or mobile phones.

Another project was born from Ushahidi.com when South Africa was engulfed with xenophobic attacks in May this year. Ushahidi was the driving force behind citizens reporting on crisis incidents around the country. Rotich explained how the site was also used as a platform to lobby support from international governments against the violent attacks.

If you look locally, mobile citizen media will soon become a reality. Grahamstown youth will start using phones as interactive journalistic tools through the Indaba Ziyafika,  a citizen journalism initiative which will roll out within the next four years.

To my surprise, this is all manifesting right in my country and I’m only getting the details of the whole story now.

The presentation also touched on developing mobile applications that could be used to send MMS’s on all mobile models, without only using GPRS enabled phones. Relevant, considering the fact that these fancy phones can be pricey to the more than half of Africa’s population which lives below the poverty line.

We forever lambast at digital citizens, blaming the  lack of resources and funds to roll-out such projects. But grassroots media projects are starting to run, even in small scales in our continent.

Technological encumbrances aside, and lets start looking at what we have because really now, we’ll wait for aid until Jesus comes, if we keep making technology an excuse for citizen media. Is it not time that citizen’s started taking news-making of their community news into their own hands?

The success of these projects can only stem from the volunteers who constantly avail their resources to these citizens so they could to tell their stories and of course the grassroots communities who also take the initiative of telling their stories.

On that thought, while facebooking the other day, I stumbled across these numbers. At least 83 percent of South Africa’s population owns a mobile phone.

Well if you look around, from gogo’s who are some times technically challenged by these little devices to even five year olds who are doing the rounds on Mxit and chatting! Almost everyone owns a cell phone these days. These fancy and some not so fancy, but practical gadgets have become a necessity that drives our lifestyles.

Because of their popularity, even their price tags have simultaneously dropped. You can even get one for 50 bucks these days…I’m still not convinced with this price tag though!

Cell phones have certainly transformed the dynamics of how we communicate amongst each other.  Most relevant is that they have managed to bridge the social rural-urban divide that is so evident when you look at ICT penetration statistics in South Africa.

We live in a technically advanced society and mobile phones are not only a means of communication, but they also have produced a creative social platform where almost every South African can express themselves in.  Even marketers are responding to this technological surge because I occasionally receive advertorial smses. 

Given these pros, it seems inevitable to assign mobile phones as the tool for citizen media. At this year’s Digital Citizen Indaba workshops during the Highway Africa conference, these pro’s kept popping up.  The conference was a discussion of how citizen journalism has evolved over the years and how citizen journalists can make use of technologies available to them.

The term digital citizen also kept crawling up during these workshops. Digital citizens are not only limited to the elites of society who have access to computers and the internet. Citizens who make use of technology items such as cell phones to tell the stories of their communities are also digital citizens.

The qualities of any technological item that can be used to empower grassroots citizens for participatory media are affordability and skills for using the technology. And the mobile phone manages to avail these epitomes as well as reach hard to reach communities.

The mobile phone is already seen as a tool for facilitating development initiatives and Africa cannot ignore this trend. In countries like Rwanda , the mobile phone has been used to facilitate communication between clinics and patients.

Since South Africa is still legging behind when it comes to ICT infrastructural development, why not then adopt cell phones as practical tools to advance citizen media in our small communities.  We are already sending smses, videos and MMSes’s to our close friends using our phones. Why not then use the phone to advance our communities and tell our stories?

Instead of folding hands, complaining and waiting for government funds that take probes and commissions of enquiry before they get to the people intended for.

When I wrote my blog last week, making a proposal to the three network providers to sponsor grassroots citizens with cell phone kits, I had hopped that lucky someone out there would be listening, well reading.  And I haven’t received any promises nor proposals. Well not yet!

An empowering aspect of citizen journalism is that it provides a voice for the voiceless. Also true – thanks to technology, a growing number of ordinary citizens are now able to tell their stories. Initiatives such as reporter.co.za have certainly re-defined the media atmosphere in South Africa. Even masses of ordinary citizens, who usually hang in social networks, are now dubbed as digital citizens.

Still on technology, the latest statistics from Nielsen reveal that at least 3.8 million South Africans have access to the internet. That’s about what, 8 % of the 47 million population? This is a huge growth compared to what the numbers used to look like a couple of years ago. 

The figures also reveal that at least 61 % of the users  are working class found in the metropolitan cities; Durban, Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg. This leaves the rest of those with internet access scattered across the country.  

Since this is the case, it means that those residing in urban areas are at the forefront of citizen media, leaving the lingering number out from participating since they lack resources.

The surge of technology users that has been experienced in the last few years means that small communities and masses in urban areas can access information and participate in media, through blogging for instance.  Ordinary citizens are no longer relegated to the role of consumers of media only, but are now participating in media production which has provided diversity in content.

But such internet statistics paint an evident social divide, which translates to minority communities being overlooked at and questions the diversity of voices found in the media.

When I stumbled across these numbers, I imagined an isolated community in beautiful rural Eastern Cape or the Manyiseni village near the Swaziland border, which had stories to tell – but had no means to do so. Frankly speaking, infrastructural development and the thorny issue of funds to kick-start citizen media initiatives in grassroots areas remains a challenge in our country.

The Media Development and Diversity Agency and NGO’s such as SANGONeT have tried to tap into grassroots areas through the provision of grants and subsidies to individual media projects- to promote media development and diversity in these areas. Yet citizen media remains a privilege for the select few.

Government is often interrogated and blamed for taking a backseat when it comes to funding participatory media initiatives. But Gawd forbid, we expect handouts from the government each time we need to do something!

Really now! Our crumbling government has serious things to take care of politically speaking. Like shutting up Malema and disgracing T-bo touch aka Thabo Mbeki! It is the duty of us all who call ourselves citizens to also initiate change in our small communities.

Perhaps the task now is also to start urging the private sector to invest in journalism initiatives aimed at grassroots areas.

How about we lobby one of the three mobile network providers to spare a few millions and roll-out a programme that will see grassroots societies subsidized with mobile phones and free sms bundles.This way, they can send news items to citizen media forums. Of course, you would have to control this by making standard the numbers the phone can send smses to so that smses are not misused.

This is just still in thought, nothing on paper yet…

Back to my gentleman. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll call him Never. Now Never had been complaining to his ward councilor about a heap of rubbish left in front of his house by his fellow neighbours. And the problem had persisted for a few years – three to be precise. 

“Grocott’s Mail is my last stop, because I’ve told my ward councilor several times about this to no vail. I want you to take this matter up with the premier, Mbulelo Sogoni. And also tell him (Sogoni) that I want to open a cop shop and run it in my neighborhood because crime is rife there,” he sighed. “By telling you all of this and even dragging the provincial head into our little community’s problems am I not asking for trouble,” he asked me. 

The look that followed in my face said it all. Perplexed, pitiful and helpless. Yes, helpless because I didn’t know what to say next to someone who wants me to fight his community battles and perplexed because honestly, I’m just a journalist. Nothing more and nothing less! To cut a very long tale short, for the next couple of days, I had to bare daily unannounced visits from Never who came to see my progress with the story and see if I had contacted the office of the premier to request his cop shop. I did write the story though, but calling the premier was just beyond what I could do.

You are probably asking yourself “Women, the the point you are trying to make here is?”

Well, I’m also trying to figure out if citizens cannot be given the chance to tell their own stories. A chance to tell issues that are of public interest to them, especially to their communities. Rubbish heap left opposite a house might not sound newsworthy to a mainstream journalist writing for a national audience, but it certainly bothers the disgruntled residents of the small community from Joza in Grahamstown.

The media, especially at local level- community newspapers and radios- should start being accessible to ordinary citizens so that they can use it to address issues that affect their communities. There’s a crowd out there using all forms of mediums accessible to distribute information that is relevant to them. And I’m afraid, it seems as though the mainstream media is not picking this up. Or is it just ignoring these trends?

Instead, the media should be offering resources where citizens can learn discover and participate in media within their small communities. Times have certainly changed. And how we tell our community stories as well as what we tell also needs to change….