communication had been there, but
how little information had come
out. They were essentially cut off
from the rest of the world. So the
experience of a freelancer, coupled
with the realisation of how powerful
a mobile phone could be, gave me
the idea of a micro-reporting
network, and one that was a cross
between the technology world,
which I’d worked in, the media that
I’d worked in and the development
sector that I’d also worked in. And I
think two years on we’re quite
nicely positioned between those
three sectors.
How do you curate media from
such diverse sources and make
them relevant for digitally
discerning audiences?
The work that we’ve done with
Ebola is a classic example. I trained
a reporter network back in 2012 for
the Sierra Leone elections. Between
the Sierra Leone elections and now,
the kind of journalism they’ve been
able to produce has been really
hyper-local. But it’s showed huge
promise and has allowed them to
test different ways of reporting.
But two years later, suddenly they
found themselves in one of the
world’s worst epidemics. It’s a
really interesting example of why
investing in quite a disparate
network of citizen reporters, who are
well-trained and well-supported
over a number of years, actually
bears a lot of fruit when it comes to
something like the Ebola outbreak.
Now we’re working with a
network of about 40 reporters
across the country, all experiencing
the Ebola outbreak in different
ways. Considering Sierra Leone is
quite a small country and sparsely
populated in areas, that’s given us
some good coverage.
When the outbreak actually
started, one of our reporters in
Kailahun, which is near the Guinea
Liberian border, alerted us by text
message. Our reporter Moses Kortu
had been reporting on minor
border skirmishes and trade issues
for the past two years. Suddenly, he
was flagging the fact that Ebola had
raised its head at a local level.
There was tremendous concern and
it seemed people were dying; we
were able to put that out there
immediately. Then we were contacted
by the BBC who heard an echo of
that news, and straight away Moses
became one of the only people on
the ground who was trained and
able to report from the region.
Given that it was so quickly put
under quarantine and people
weren’t able to go out there very
easily, it became a very important
contact for the mainstream media.
We had Channel 4 running pieces
with Moses, and BBC and
Huffington Post.
Moses is an average citizen. His
background is not in media and yet
he used all of the training he’d been
given. We were on the phone to
him the whole time, explaining the
best ways to ensure that he could
get information without putting
himself in jeopardy, which was a
really interesting time for us to
learn how we could support
someone from afar. He did
everything from interviews to
clarification of the data points that
were coming out and it was this
information that got out into the
public sphere. Then hot on Moses’
heels came the rest of the reporters,
as Ebola spread out to the southern
region, to Bo and Freetown and
even Kabala in the north.
How are the Radar journalists paid?
We have a two-part model for
payment. Firstly, when the media
that we produce goes to mainstream,
we act as a middleman and we
broker a freelance rate for that. If
it’s collaborative, then it’s split
between the reporters. We retain
none of it. We don’t work on
commission. They keep 100% of
that revenue.
It’s very exciting because
sometimes that’s a huge amount of
money for them. We have some
situations where a reporter is paid
£150 for a piece of work and they
can then buy a computer for the
first time.
If the media they produce hasn’t
earned money, and we see value in
pushing it out anyway, then we
have a small pot of funds where we
give ten dollars for each piece of
“
Young
peoplewith
disabilities
are very
rights-
aware
”
THE CHANNEL
|
JOURNALISM
26
|
ISSUE 1 2015
|
THE CHANNEL
