Project Title:About People -- A community journalism project
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:$500,000
Expected amount of time to complete project:1
Total cost of project including all sources of funding:$700,000
Describe your project:We will create a “newswire”, which empowers the most disadvantaged in India to become community journalists, reporting on their local issues to the mainstream media. This will be ensuring that the exciting new trend of Citizen Journalism develops in a way that is inclusive of the poorest.
The immediate outcome of a grant will be 60 Community Journalists (two from each state in India), who will be from the most disadvantaged communities. They will be given flip cams, and training in producing short 3-minute stories. The CJ’s will be local ‘citizen monitors,’ using the camera to expose corruption, and then using sms to community members, and community screenings to government officials, to draw attention to the issues. This project will in this way unify video with other web-based CJ tools.
We will create partnerships with mainstream media to create campaigns around the issues. We will market our CJs to the mainstream as low-cost stringers in the remotest parts of the country. We will also create a different web-based campaign every six weeks in partnership with different Indian social movements and NGOs, to draw attention to pressing problems and their solutions.
Outside of being a platform to access stories from rural India, the CJ program will also spark community journalism as a social movement in itself in each state in India. This will be the most low-cost, high impact model of citizen journalism made expressly to empower the poorest of the poor to advocate on their own for human rights and accountability. VV will work with the most entrepreneurial of the CJs in future years to enable them to start Community Video Units, work as stringers for the mainstream, or start their own video businesses, so that a scalable community media movement firmly takes root.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?We will target 240 villages of rural India whose residents will regularly access the CJs for support in reporting corruption and will learn to cell phone photos, video and SMS to advocate. These villages will also get better information because we will improve the “stringer” system. Stringers in rural India are currently untrained in journalism, nearly all Brahmin males, and their main work for the paper is to sell subscriptions or advertising. Thus papers don’t cover certain issues like untouchability. But our CJ’s (representative in terms of caste, gender and religion) will be trained to focus on these issues that the stringers don’t cover. Thus they will bring out better stories, and be more appealing stringers than what is there now.
How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)Events in the Iran elections represented a mind shift for some stations to view citizen journalism as a viable business force. However, right now CJ only reaches the middle classes and hence can perpetuate the digital divide.
This model is innovative as compared to other CJ programs as it directly targets the poor:
• It is a low cost model
• It introduces journalism as a career option.
• It is a good business model because it provides exactly the kind of stories the mainstream media is lacking -- from tribal areas and smaller towns in their own voice.
• It can be competitive financially as it will be cheaper than the mainstream and provide interesting content. In that sense, community journalists stick to their strengths.
What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?The News Challenge is already supporting our Community Video Unit program.
Since 2003 VV has trained more than 175 community producers who have created over 50 videos viewed by some 200,000 people in community screenings. Each film has generated documented instances of significant action. Made up of some of the country's most disadvantaged citizens, our network is one of the largest community media projects targeting the poorest of the poor.
VV is active in the US, India, and Brazil, and has partnered with Witness, the Global Fund for Children, Pangea Day, MTV, and others. We have won an Echoing Green Fellowship, TED Fellowship, the NYU Stern Social Business Plan Competition, a Tech Museum Award for Equality, and a short-list for the Development Gateway Awards. In 2008 we were one of the five shortlisted organizations for the King Baudouin Foundation (of Belgium) International Development Prize.
This project builds on our Knight Funded CVU program. It is more scalable because the cost per CJ is much lower. It is a stronger tool in advocacy at a national/international level (not local), is designed to be marketable to the mainstream media. VV’s CVU model demonstrates that the uneducated can produce meaningful media. We now believe we can develop community video as a viable business model that will eventually be largely supported by the mainstream media by starting the CJ program. Thus, it is inline with the News Challenge’s focus on creating innovative mainstream news models.
