The event is free, but registration is required. Register here.

Speakers

Newseum – 555 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest. Documentary Theater, Concourse Level. Washington, DC 20001

The panel is hosted by the Visual Arts Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts and is free and open to the public.

Time: 

Tuesday November 17, 2015 at 5:00 PM

Location:

Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University

Civic Square Auditorium

33 Livingston Ave, New Brunswick, New Jersey

More information is available here.

Madeleine Bair, Program Manager for the WITNESS Media Lab.

On Thursday November 5, Madeleine Bair of the WITNESS Media Lab will give a presentation on her work for Her Girl Friday, a group focused on women in journalism. The event, titled “The New Era of Civil Rights Reporting,” will also include a panel featuring journalists from Al Jazeera, The Associated Press, The New York Times Magazine, and USA Today.

The event is free and open to the public. All genders are encouraged to attend.

Location:

ThoughtWorks NYC

99 Madison Ave (Between 29th & 30th Street) Floor 15

New York, NY 10016

Questions? Email Jared: JHatch [at] ThoughtWorks [dot] com

Register here

Facebook Event

In July 2015, Program Director Sam Gregory was interviewed by Mexican newspaper Prensa Reforma on documenting human rights abuses using video. The interviewed followed the second Video4Change convening in Mexico City. Sam also discussed the importance of the right to film, how to document protest situations, and how video can be used as evidence.

You can read the full story in Spanish here.

In August, WITNESS Latin America consultant Indira Cornelio appeared on RompeViento, an online television station, to discuss citizen journalism. Indira highlighted the recent Video4Change Latin America convening and how WITNESS engages with activists to help them maximize the use of video on their work.

Indira Cornelio (front right) on RompeViento.

The full video broadcast in Spanish is available here.

And finally, Madeleine Bair, Program Manager for the WITNESS Media Lab was featured in the “Buena Gente” (good people) section of El Diario-La Prensa in New York City. Bair highlighted WITNESS’ work on police violence in the United States and how bystander video can impact the justice process.

Read the full article in Spanish.

Featured image: Madeleine Bair at work via El Diario-La Prensa

In collaboration with the News Lab at Google, and continuing the work of its predecessor, the Human Rights Channel on YouTube, the WITNESS Media Lab will address the challenges of finding, verifying, and contextualizing eyewitness videos for the purpose of creating lasting change.

The WITNESS Media Lab will focus on one issue for a few months at a time, using new tools, strategies and platforms for research, verification and contextualization of citizen video. We will share analysis and resources publicly online via case studies, blog articles, multimedia presentations and through in-person convenings with peers. The first project will look at several cases of eyewitness video of police violence in the United States.

“We’re incredibly encouraged by the growing capacity of people everywhere to capture video of human rights abuses in their communities. We’re also aware of the critical need for skills to harness the potential of those videos, in order to turn them into tools for justice,” said Madeleine Bair, Program Manager for the WITNESS Media Lab.

Drawing on more than two decades of supporting people to use video for human rights advocacy, the WITNESS Media Lab will leverage the organization’s in-house expertise as well as that of our extensive peer networks in the fields of advocacy, technology, and journalism. Together with them, the WITNESS Media Lab will seek to develop solutions to ensure that footage taken by average citizens can impact some of the world’s most pressing and persistent injustices.

“Videos depicting human rights abuses on YouTube can be an incredibly powerful tool to expose injustice, but context is critical to ensuring they have maximum impact,” said Steve Grove of the News Lab at Google. “We’re thrilled that WITNESS is bringing their deep expertise to this space in the WITNESS Media Lab, and we are honored to be partnering with them.”

For more details visit us at WITNESS Media Lab website and follow us @WITNESS_Lab. And YouTube published an announcement today detailing their support of the WITNESS Media Lab and a two other projects focused on the power of citizen video.

Press inquiries and requests for interviews should be directed to Matisse Bustos-Hawkes at WITNESS via our press kit or on Twitter @matissebh.

About the News Lab at Google

The News Lab at Google is the company’s effort to empower innovation at the intersection of technology and media. Our mission is to collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs to build the future of media with Google. We do this through a global outreach effort to empower technology-driven storytelling in newsrooms; a strong data journalism practice based on our Google Trends platform; and through unique partnerships that seek to increase access to quality information globally.

• Senior Program Manager for the Middle East and Africa, Bukeni Waruzi, conducted a training for LGBTQI activists in Johannesburg, South Africa May 4-10. The training brought together 25 activists from South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and Swaziland for a week-long training on advocacy, filming, storytelling and distribution for the promotion of LGBTQI rights.

• Thursday, June 4, Program Manager Madeleine Bair will be participating in the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City. The conference, that runs June 4-5, brings together  opinion makers, political practitioners, technologists, and journalists to explore the intersection of politics and technology. Madeleine will be participating on the panel, “Check It Before You Wreck It”, discussing video verification. Find out more about the conference and Madeleine’s panel here.

• Matisse Bustos-Hawkes, Senior Communications Manager, will be participating in the Greenwich Film Festival, speaking on the panel, “Social Impact”. The conversation will explore why some social issues garner more media attention than others, and discuss the role of film and media in proliferating social issues around the globe. The panel is free and open to the public— come check it out!

• Mark your calendars: On Monday, June 29, WITNESS will be hosting a free screening of Jon Stewart’s Rosewater in Brooklyn, NY. Keep an eye out for more details to come!

The panelists’ discussion will include questions such as:

• How can citizen media to move beyond raising awareness of issues to using it for justice including, in some cases, legal evidence.
• What can be done to combat the trend of falsified or recycled video?
• How can today’s technology enable people to more thoroughly authenticate their video, making it more trustworthy?

The conversation will also address some of the ethical questions related to citizen media:

• Where and when should human rights abuse media be shown publicly and who decides?
• What measures can be taken to better prevent this and better protect victims’ identities before sharing media online?

Participants in the Google+ Hangout Discussion will include:

• Madeleine Bair – Program Manager of the Human Rights Channel at WITNESS. Follow her on Twitter @madbair and @ythumanrights
• Christoph Koettl – Advisor, Crisis Response at Amnesty International. Follow him on Twitter @ckoettl
• Irene Herrera – Venezuelan filmmaker, journalist, Assistant Professor at Temple University Japan, and co-founder of Video Venezuela. Follow her on Twitter @herrera_irene
• Moderated by: Dan Mahanty – Senior Advisor for Office of Security and Human Rights in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. Follow him on Twitter @danmahanty

The discussion can be viewed live online via Google+ Hangout here. You can also join the conversation by tweeting @witnessorg or any of the participants using #stateofrights and #video4change.

** UPDATE: Here are some recap materials following the panel

Watch the discussion in its entirety here.

Check out the online discussion and questions from the event on Storify here.

Sniffing out hoaxes is not always so easy. But as user-generated content plays a greater role in news coverage, we need to do a better job verifying what it is we’re seeing, and giving our audience the context they need to understand it.

You may not be able to say with 100 percent certainty where and when the footage was filmed, but you can at least avoid misinforming your audience or putting a citizen at risk.

Her article on MuckRack’s blog is aimed at journalists, but is useful for any of us who want to maintain a healthy skepticism about the vast amounts of video footage circulating. In essence, seeing should not always mean ‘believing’.

In addition to the five tips Madeleine shares in the article, she also connects readers to a Verification resource page we’ve created on the Human Rights Channel’s site with more in depth guidance and tools from organizations such as Amnesty International, Ushahidi and the European Journalism Centre.

Meanwhile, in Cebu, Philippines, Arul Prakkash, our program manager for Asia was also talking verification. Prakkash attended the 2015 Global Voices Summit. Global Voices is an international community of bloggers, journalists and citizens who report and translate stories from their communities to share globally on the internet. Here is some of the feedback following the the workshop that focused on the basics of verifying citizen video:

Very good session on how to verify videos for documentation purposes, by @arulprk from @witnessorg. Super practical and useful. #GV2015

— Leila Nachawati Rego (@leila_na) January 24, 2015

@arulprk: key tools to #verify videos http://t.co/cvQCufzdLg, http://t.co/vKDwsYXIFN, http://t.co/2YldyLsa7p, googleReverseImage

— QZ (@Natrani) January 24, 2015

In it, you’ll find thoughtful analysis by Madeleine Bair, the HRC’s Program Manager, a short video highlighting regions and issues we covered, information and contextualization around the source videos that have informed our thinking, and an interactive map highlighting many of the human rights violations we followed this year.

As Madeleine writes in her introduction:

What stands out this year is not only the sheer volume of citizen footage, but the growing audience for it. More investigators, researchers, journalists, and activists are getting their information from video recorded by average people documenting their own communities. More citizens are engaged with human rights issues because footage fills their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Of course, not all human rights issues are captured on video, and not all online videos of human rights capture mass attention. But today, all of us come face to face with human rights abuse on our screens, and must confront what it exposes, what it means, and what we can do about it.

The Human Rights Channel 2014 Year in Review can be read, watched and interacted with here.

Images: Selected video stills from the HRC Year in Review video. Select to enlarge.

Here’s how she begins:

From documenting the war in Syria to capturing police killings in New York City, citizen videos are exposing important events and becoming part of the fabric of the media ecosystem around the world. Yet for newsrooms and journalists, traditional protocols and practices do not adequately address the editorial, ethical, and technological complications of using citizen videos. Issues of trust, consent, preservation, and safety must be reconsidered when videos are captured by amateurs, uploaded by anonymous individuals, and managed by the policies of technology companies.

In the article, Madeleine draws on lessons learned from a filmed sexual assault in Egypt’s Tahrir Square to outline a variety of issues legacy and new media newsrooms face as they increasingly leverage citizen reporting in their news coverage.

While the viral video put sexual violence at the top of newly inaugurated President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s agenda, it also exposed the potential of eyewitness video to re-victimize individuals on camera, disappear from YouTube, and lead to more questions than answers surrounding the issue it documents. Legacy and new media outlets reported on the video in a variety of ways, demonstrating the inconsistencies of reporting with citizen footage and highlighting the need for new tools and guidelines to facilitate its safe, effective, and ethical use. As citizen footage becomes an essential and ubiquitous medium for social documentation, the video offers one case study of the serious concerns that must be addressed, not only by the news industry, but also by technology companies, civil society, and the public at large.

Read on at Arab Media & Society: Navigating the Ethics of Citizen Video: The Case of a Sexual Assault in Egypt.

For more on issues and ideas surrounding citizen video, visit The Human Rights Channel.

About: Arab Media & Society explores media, technology and their “interaction with society-at-large” in the Arab world. It is supported by the American University in Cairo.