CAIRO: A common feeling of resentment towards the coverage of the revolution in both state-owned and private media has led young activists to launch their alternative media outlets using social networks.
A number of online platforms have become the main source of revolution-related news from across Egypt, leaving online portals of daily newspapers like Al-Shorouk and Al-Masry Al-Youm fiercely competing against them.
But even among these organized citizen journalism news networks which depend on social media networking for volunteer reporters, photographers and editors, the competition is strong.
The latest network to join the race is Mayadeen Masr News Network (M.M.N.N) which was launched last month to "confront the controlled media and cover the news as it is without exaggeration or marginalization."
"The idea of a social media news network is not new but people have lost faith in media and now looking for a new model that is originated from them … from people who belong to the revolution," said Ibrahim Gamal El-Din, co-founder of MMNN.
From people to people
This independent media formula "from the people to the people" has attracted over 12,000 fans on MMNN’s Facebook page and nearly 3000 followers on Twitter in a few weeks. Gamal El-Din and Sarah Othman, one of the network’s founders who tweets under the name @Shmpongo, have been telling their networks and Tweet Nadwa audience about their new media model.
Part of the popularity is due to "punishing likes" to Rassd News Network (R.N.N), Othman says, explaining that people ‘liked’ their pages in punishment to Rassd which lost its credibility for being biased towards the Muslim Brotherhood.
MMNN attributes the news to their sources (Twitter and Facebook users … etc) for credibility issues.
It is being managed Gamal El-Din, a political science student at the American University in Cairo, and Othman, a social media coordinator at a daily talk show.
"We also do our homework to verify the news among our networks before publishing it. Accuracy for us is more important than getting a scoop," Othman told Daily News Egypt.
25Egypt
Another network is 25Egypt that was launched by eight young activists only three days before the wide protests on January 25.
"Our team has now 25 active Egyptian members living inside and outside Egypt. We verify identities and meet fixed reporters in person to ensure credibility," said Ahmed Ayman, a medical student and one of 25Egypt’s founders.
Although the news network has members who belong to different political trends like the April 6 Youth Movement, Mohamed ElBaradei supporters and others inclined to the Muslim Brotherhood, none affects 25Egypt’s editorial policy according to Ayman.
"It was our agreement from the beginning," he said.
Having attracted more nearly 14,000 followers on Twitter and over 49,000 fans on Facebook, 25Egypt may shortly launch their news website. "Hopefully it will be launched before the elections," Ayman noted.
Rassd and the Twitter formula
This month, Rassd, the ground-breaking alternative media network, is set to launch its website as an addition to its active social media portal. The news formula adopted in the website will be short news stories of 140 characters (like Twitter) to suit the internet audience as Rassd News Network (R.N.N) founders say.
The team of R.N.N is composed of four different committees; one for editing the news, another for correspondents all over Egypt, a third for multimedia such as photos and videos and the fourth for public relations, development and training. They connect through closed groups on Facebook and meet at coffee shops.
Rassd is taking its success to another level through the website and a large team of volunteers after nearly a year of active citizen journalism on Facebook and Twitter. Rassd, which stands for Rakeb (observe), Sawwer (shoot) and Dawwen (blog), played a major role in exposing forgery in the last parliamentary elections in November 2010.
Private media has been attacking Rassd, accusing it of circulating rumors for "competition reasons." Rassd’s YouTube channel was closed after ONTV "falsely claimed" they violated their talk shows copyrights taking down hundreds of revolution-related videos on Rassd channel, Amr Salama, media student and one of Rassd’s founders, told DNE.
"We’re currently facing a fierce campaign to close down Rassd. Our personal accounts are being hacked to control our content," Salama said. R.N.N’s page on Facebook was taken down for nearly 40 minutes during the Abbaseya clashes on July 23.
"Do we have to be biased just because we’re Islamists running a media network? Do people say Al-Masry Al-Youm is biased because it’s owned by liberals?" Salama asked.
According to him, Rassd was the first media network that portrayed the "complete truth" about the Muslim Brotherhood which is usually attacked in the media.
The measure for Rassd’s success, Salama says, is the number of followers who are close to a million on Facebook and 90,000 on Twitter. R.N.N lately ranked the 6th most influential media in the Arab world according to Media Source Company after Al Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and Al-Masry Al-Youm but before CNN.
This social media news model soon extended to Libya, Morocco, Syria, Jerusalem and Turkey where Rassd established local networks. However, Salama denied that R.N.N has an Islamic ideology but rather a revolutionary vision that reflects all groups.
Merge
Media experts expect the expansion of the internet in the next decade and the growth of the trend of providing live coverage that is carried by the people.
At the same time, experts still hope that transparency increases in the media field when it comes to ownership, editorial policy and funding resources.
"Alternative voices become more and more included in the mainstream media in what’s called ‘periphery to the center’ mechanism. Social media growingly increases as sources and as actors," said Hanan Badr, teaching assistant at Cairo University, expecting traditional and alternative media to merge.
Most talk shows, if not all, have introduced a new job position for social media in their working teams. People chosen for this job are usually bloggers or online activists who are social media savvy and not necessarily journalists.
Credibility, Badr says, is a multitude of factors and not only about the medium itself where it is published, but also who is saying it, how reasonable it sounds, what interests it serves.
"There is a media policy behind each medium. Egypt’s political culture is radical polarized, which means that there is fragmentation into Islamist, liberal, nationalist and socialist media. Not all media users are aware of the ownership or who is behind the media, and this the ABC of media literacy," said Badr who subscribes to Facebook pages like Rassd and Egypt News Network (E.N.N.) to follow the news from Germany where she’s currently studying.
"The easy access and lack of professionalism might make the online social media act and be less professional than the institutional media … and often wrong news can be forwarded and spread," she said.
