Mobile: With 5 billion devices units in use, mobile has become an important tool for news. Google seeks projects that use mobile devices to produce, deliver, consume, share and otherwise engage with news. Maji Mazuri would provide a community owned radio station where people can text opinions (to the radio) and vote using sms or social media tools like Twitter.
Authenticity: How can we help news users better evaluate the validity and trustworthiness of news and information? How can we better filter and assess the credibility of what we read and watch?
Mathare is a very close-knit community and we will have reporters from different ghetto villages that all work together behind carefully constructed firewalls built on strict traditional standards of journalistic ethics. News will be peer reviewed and checked by a committee. The committee of community representatives, experts and confrere journalists is already in place and is very aware of the dangers of false information. One goal of this program is to help people better understand the reliability of news and information sources and negotiate our oft-chaotic media world. Members of the multi-media group and committee have received formal training on how to work on this as soon as the radio is active. The community as a whole also has an outlet to verify information (by calling to the radio, leave comments on our website, text, tweet and so on).
At the same time the radio educates people on looking at so called ‘facts’ from different angles. The goal is to encourage the community to look at the different perspectives concerning issues. Debates, open forums and so on will educate the community about the reliability of news and trigger critical thinking. Workshops with youth have also been incorporated. Each week 15 youth are trained and this will spread the message on autonomous thinking, creating your own opinions by independently assessing news.
Sustainability: Advertising is the number 1 way of making this project sustainable in the long run. We are also looking at income from an endowment and donations from foundations, individuals, and corporations. Donors that choose to fund particular reporting projects understand that their funding will not influence content.
Community: Google seeks groundbreaking technologies that support news and information specifically within defined geographic areas.
“We understand what drives public opinion. We want our stories to be personal and relevant as a way of raising awareness around the source of violence and conflict resolution in our community.” – MC, Mathare Valley Resident and Member of Maji Mazuri multi-media group
Community radio is accessible to the majority of (semi-) illiterate people living in ghetto communities citizen journalism aims to target.
Websites like MapMathare which map insecurity in ghettos like Mathare valley rely heavily on good reporters on the ground and frequent updates on information. The multi-media team would provide these. This team has not just trust but a solid understanding of the community in which they operate. We can’t have a digital journalism initiative without journalists.
Hence there’s a need for a solid reciprocal relationship between these two types of media which the establishment of a community owned radio station in Mathare would provide.
As journalism quickens the pace of its move to the Web, this Maji Mazuri program is filling a niche by providing specialized content that is considered essential by an audience of shared interests but that can’t be found in such detail anywhere else. In many ways, it is reflective of a shift in how we define journalism, or at the very least, in how we go about producing and sharing it.
The community radio station seeks to provide authoritative, in-depth coverage of a major local problem – violence in the ghetto – that few, if any, mainstream news organizations can match. Few reporters from main stream radio, television, and weekly magazines dare to venture into the Mathare Valley slum.
A radio station focused on a single issue can fill a critical void in public understanding, providing a form of public-service journalism that evokes comparison to the influence of radio investigations in shaping local and national conversations and actions. It invites public engagement, recognizing value in the collective wisdom of diverse voices.
It offers one possible form for the Radio of the future: an online publication narrowly focused on a specific topic, with content that includes interpretation, analysis, investigative reporting, and interactive engagement and that utilizes all of the tools of multimedia storytelling. In its singular focus, it may fulfill on a global scale an important mission of the local radio – that is, community influence.
Radio journalism is generally considered to be an indispensable monitor of public and civic behavior, and understood to have a duty to hold people in powerful positions accountable. Without this kind of journalism our democracy will suffer.
Without Radios to serve as watchdogs for the public, it is feared, those who mismanage public responsibilities will go unchecked and more of the public’s business will be carried out unobserved, particularly in a community like Mathare Valley.