Mozambique Newspaper Monitors Polling Places With New Citizen Reporting Tool

By: Kendall McCabe | 07/12/2013

The editorial team at Mozambique's @Verdade newspaper is gearing up to report on the country's municipal elections in November and national elections next year. With 2,500 polling stations across the country to monitor, it’s a tough job for any newsroom, and especially for @Verdade’s, which has just an 11-person editorial staff.

That's where an innovative citizen reporter network comes into play.

For the first time ever, citizens are helping @Verdade to report on the election process. They’re using Citizen Desk, a new toolkit that helps news organizations incorporate citizen journalism into their work online or in print. With Citizen Desk, @Verdade can collect, verify, reward and publish reports sent by citizens through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and SMS.

Citizens are helping to answer questions such as: Are polling places open? Are officials present and voters free of intimidation? Is the equipment functioning correctly?

During the elections, @Verdade will use Citizen Desk to monitor various information feeds, verify the information, save notes in a contact database and then choose the best content and include it in dynamic, live articles.

Citizen Desk is one of 20 winners of the 2012 African News Innovation Challenge contest (ANIC), designed to encourage experimentation in digital technologies and support the best innovations designed to strengthen African news organizations. The contest, modeled on the Knight News Challenge, was launched by the African Media Initiative under the leadership of ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellow Justin Arenstein.

Read the full post on IJNet.

The International Journalists' Network, IJNet, keeps professional and citizen journalists up to date on the latest media innovations, online journalism resources, training opportunities and expert advice. ICFJ produces IJNet in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. IJNet is supported by donors including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Image courtesy of Flickr user sjcockell under a Creative Commons license.

News Category

Program News

Topics

Critical-Issues Reporting

Latest News

Hans Staiger Award Winner Investigates Russian Soldiers Secretly Treated in Belarus Hospitals, Including Those Linked to War Crimes

Leaked data from the Russian Defense Ministry shook the story loose. A team of investigators found that during the first 21 months of the invasion of Ukraine, nearly 1,000 Russian soldiers were treated at Belarusian hospitals, including war crime suspects. These “secret patients,” as they were known, directly tied Belarus to Moscow’s war effort.

I Blew Up on TikTok with Journalism — Here's How You Can, Too

l'll never forget the day when an editor at the BBC told a 25-year-old me that journalists shouldn’t be on TikTok because “there’s so much misinformation on there.” By that point, I had maybe 10,000 followers on the platform, possibly more, and the comment stung. My TikToks, which had amplified my journalism as well as my passion for learning new languages, were well researched and I hoped the direct opposite of misinformation.

A New Era for News: Sharon Moshavi on AI, Micro Media and More

ICFJ President Sharon Moshavi recently joined Interlochen Public Radio News Director Ed Ronco for a public conversation on the state of journalism, hosted by the International Affairs Forum at Northwestern Michigan College. The discussion, part of the forum’s ongoing series focused on global affairs and press freedom, brought together journalists, students and community members from across northern Michigan. Topics included the erosion of trust in media, the collapse of traditional business models, the growing impact of artificial intelligence and the need for innovation in how journalism is practiced and supported.