Tech trends are fickle things. Back in 2004, if you were starting a media business online, or thinking of expanding your offline media business, one direction seemed obvious: adopt RSS, or really simple syndication, so users can get a feed of your content easily, without signing up for newsletters. The term ‘RSS’ overtook ‘newsletter’ as a search term on Google in July of that year.

A year or so later, and your crack team of tech advisors would have told you you need to get into podcasts. Everyone has an iPod, they’d tell you, and everyone is listening to this stuff. Indeed, by early 2006 ‘podcast’ had overtaken ‘RSS’ as a search term on Google. Ditto MySpace — you would have been told to get your business on this impressive social networking site — whatever that is, you would have been forgiven for thinking back then. So you start work on that.

Then, in 2009, the Amazon Kindle e-reader swept out of nothing to make electronic publishing the wave of the future, overtaking both ‘podcast’ and ‘RSS’. And then, of course, there was Facebook. And Twitter.

You get the picture: sometimes inexorable trends aren’t what they seem. RSS, it turns out, was great for delivering information to people but was too fiddly for most folk. Google, whose RSS reader had pushed most other players out of the business, closed down in 2013, citing declining use. Meanwhile newsletters, those unsexy throwbacks, are still doing fine.

So what about podcasts? Were the advisors right? Well, yes and no.

True, interest in podcasting (as a search term on Google, as reliable an indicator as any) peaked in early 2006. Interest continued to decline until the launch in late 2014 of Serial, whose first season explored a murder in Baltimore in 1999, singlehandedly pushed the podcasting niche into the mainstream. In short, podcasts are that rare breed among tech trends: they’re getting a second wind.

So what is driving this, and are podcasts worth doing?

Well, it’s true that Serial jumpstarted a fresh wave of interest. The appeal of podcasts is that they time-shift — users play them when they want, in the order they want, where they want. This may seem obvious, but Serial added a key ingredient: the serialized approach, where the story was being shaped as it went. This invited audience participation, suspense and a feeling that it was unclear where it was going.

All these elements helped differentiate podcasts from other forms of entertainment. At the same time, those coming in late could easily download old episodes: ‘Bingeable listens’ is even a category on iTunes, still the epicentre of podcasting.

The data all point to a growing market. Most figures are U.S.-centric so let’s look at another market: Australia. Recent surveys there suggest that nearly 9 million people will be listening to podcasts by 2022 — a third of the projected population.

Big players are taking note. Apple is improving its metrics, and applying some standards to podcasts it accepts for its iTunes platform and podcasting app. After leaving the field alone for years, Google is jumping in with its own Android app. Amazon has tried to add to its Audible audiobook service with some original programming, although it’s not clear how well that’s going.

Investors are interested: Luminary Media secured $40 million in venture capital funding for its subscription-based service. And of course Spotify has added NPR’s backcatalogue to its subscription service. Companies like Audible and Spotify are already in a sweet spot because they have already convinced users to subscribe. Most podcasts are free, and it’s hard to change users’ minds, as we’ve found to our cost in online journalism.

But of course, as we’ve learned from the past: trends can be reversed, even when they’re enjoying a second life. So will podcasts wither too?

Here’s how I see it for media players. Don’t do podcasts as an afterthought; it’s your brand and if you mess it up listeners might not come back. But do see how much you can do without having to create content afresh. If you’re in the spoken word business already, then package up 10 of your best programs and see, after a year, which ones are gaining a following.

And despite the talk of growing investment and advertising interest, don’t do it for the money. The industry is still too young and unstructured, the hits too unpredictable. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released two sets of proposals to regulate advertising metrics across the industry, and uptake has grown. But some podcasters are nervous because their reported download numbers would inevitably take a knock, at least in the short term.

Then there’s the problem of the elephants on the grass. Apple dominates the space because no podcast can afford to not be on its platform. Google is now serious about podcasts, which could be good news for podcasters in Android-heavy markets. But the app is still pretty raw, and of course will only work on Android devices, leaving those cross-platform podcast players like Overcast more appealing to many.

These big players all seek to control the choke-points in the system. They can, like Apple’s AppStore, create markets, but they can also trample them.

And there are lots of pieces missing, another sign of a wild west. The technology of inserting ads, for example is still not quite there. The Washington Post last month (eds: July) felt it necessary to develop its own internal technology, Rhapsocord, for inserting ads into podcasts. This reminds me of the early days of the web, when everything was so new we didn’t even think of calling it an ‘ecosystem.’ Only a handful of companies survived that.

It is possible to cover costs, and attract advertisers, and should soon be possible to weave podcasts into broader subscriptions. But right now it’s probably better to think of honing your podcasting skills and ideas than of viewing it as a revenue stream in its own right.

Stories such as this one, when the sheer impact of the revealed truth rocks the audience, are occasional at best. In everyday journalism, however, to get the public to pay attention to your story, to make it not only truthful, but also credible and attractive, is a hard task. And it has become even harder in the digital era. Information flows constantly through our portable electronic devices, like a river of muddy waters, dragging the authentic pieces of story-telling together with the fake; the verified; and the gossip. So if journalists want to have any chance at succeeding in this battle, to keep people informed about what really happens and why, amidst the immense debris, they must not only find good stories, but must also elevate their story-telling to an art.

There are examples of this inventiveness all over the world. For example, there is the traditional long-form literary journalism, of which Latin Americans seem to be masters. El Faro in tiny El Salvador just won the Gabriel Garcia Marques Excellency Award for their moving stories and documentaries.  Other organizations, like Initium have created a data sounds project where average temperature for the last 131 years in Hong Kong is visualized and played as musical notes.

Others are turning to explaining and making things more understandable in a confusing world of multiple competing versions of every event. One of the first to try this was US Vox.com, with “explainers” in short cards, such as this one about the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The New York Times created The Upshot, with pieces like this one that shows people how to read the current conflicting polls on the US presidential election. In the South, GKillCity from Ecuador has tried a similar version of explaining cards like in this story about UN human rights recommendations to Ecuador. There are other tools to make things clearer to the audiences:  timelines about the history; maps to locate the events; or even crossing place and time in interactive multimedia like this one made by Kloop in Kyrgyzstan to show how a protected forest in the capital Bishkek is disappearing as developers expand on ever-stretching rules.

The best way to tell stories is conversation. In the recent coup attempt in Turkey, journalists of Medyascope explained to their followers in a live-broadcast on Periscope what was going on and how they understood it and bringing the makers of news closer to their audiences. The news bots are actually lots of fun, particularly for topics people get passionate about, like soccer and elections. Univision tried the Purple Bot during the party primaries and the number of its fans grew by thousands. You don’t have to be rich or sit in the Silicon Valley to develop a bot.

Two young Spanish entrepreneurs developed politi_bot in the chat application Telegram, and did a great job informing people about the latest elections in their country.

Bots imply that a journalist and a developer have sat together to think about stories: like in art, content and form become one concept.  The potential to communicate and engage depends a lot on how well the journalist and developer work together. The result of such team work could be games, such as this one developed by ProPublica in which the user not only knows about failures in health care services to treat emergency heart attacks in New York City, but can also personally experience the anxiety of the patients; or this one crafted by Caixin, in which users can help a mayor of a Chinese city reduce pollution. These games can say a lot more about what’s happening in your part of the world than many editorials.

Where things are tough, and telling truthful stories can cost you your liberty or life, many journalists have become experts in nuance and subtlety. And under such circumstances, good political humor is always truthful. See how Medialab from Armenia reveals their political scene through cartoons.

The name of the story-telling game in the digital era is to be creative, break molds, think about your audience and work with other professionals, such as artists and software engineers. The trick is to make the routine news of everyday a bit more fun and engaging; and the deep and dead serious, attractive and, yet, still believable.
This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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However, just when many were forecasting doomsday for journalism, stories of Davids against Goliaths spring about in the world: small teams of journalists using the same technologies developed by the giants to find sources out in the world wide open web, to produce stories that expose wrongdoings by mighty rulers and potent corporations. These reporters learn how to play with the available software, use social networks and chatting services to collaborate with each other across borders and also, to contrast information and then, publish simultaneously to give power to their punches.

For example, Bellingcat, a group of citizen investigative journalists, tracked the route of the Buk missile-launcher carrying the missile that was to down the Malaysian Airlines plane over Eastern Ukraine. They used Google Earth (as well as work on-site), to verify the locations depicted in photos posted by the public; satellite pictures (the purchase of which was crowd-funded) and photos of Russian soldiers on the social networking site VKontakte that enabled the investigators to determine to which military unit the missile launcher belonged. Bellingcat also used Checkdesk, a collaboration platform, to ask citizens to verify the authenticity of specific videos and photos posted in social media and Bridge, a crowdsourcing translation tool, for quick verification of significant events during the war in Ukraine.

Journalists of Rutas del Conflicto are completing a data-base of massacres in Colombia with the victims’ aid. They want every name to be right, to bring back some humanity to the insanity of a country still resistant to look at the real face of its own tragedy; Kenyan Joshua Ogure and his friends managed to use GPS to put their beloved neighbourhood of the Kibera in the outskirts of Nairobi on the map and discovered that 81 percent of the schools were considered informal and that the government had only built 4 percent of Kibera’s schools to host almost 60.000 students.

Other groups, such as Chequeado in Argentina, Africa Check in South Africa, Stop-Fake in Ukraine, follow public discourses of their leaders and fellow journalists, join forces with users and check them with publicly available data to help citizens sort out truth from deception. According to the Reporter’s Lab, there are currently 96 active fact-checking projects in 37 countries; the third Global Fact-Checking Summit will bring leading fact-checkers to Buenos Aires in June.

Despite the uncertain future, opportunity is knocking on the door of journalism. Millions of sources –from public databases and leaked documents to photos posted in social networks and experts and witnesses among the readers – are open to be used by journalists and techies. There seems to be no limit to what reporters can discover and verify across countries and topics to hold power accountable and unearth thorny truths.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.
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The feature, which is still in beta, tested on two threads, one of which was the uprising in Ukraine.  Participants posted live updates to create a moving picture of the unfolding events. Users also posted comments about the live-blog feature, saying what worked and what could be done better – Reddit even responded to comments by adding features as they went along.

If the feature gets out of beta, it promises to be a useful tool for DIY journalists, as well as a valuable resource for professional journalists looking for real-time insight into developing news events.

In this episode you will learn about methods for investigating corruption and organized crime. You will meet Paul Radu from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the most inspiring investigative reporters from Romania. He tells the story of those working at the new frontiers of investigation.

Politicians love to talk, but apart from periodic elections – if you’re lucky – how are the people heard?

After 20 years of rule by the same party, Salvadorans voted in a new party in 2009, but the election brought little change. Instead of waiting for the next election for people to make their voices heard through their votes, Orlando Alvarez, the creative director at the ad agency Publicidad Comercial Lowe & Partners, wanted to explore the possibilities of a digital-led advertising and engagement campaign. He approached news website El Faro with the idea of using Twitter to allow the citizens of El Salvador to voice their concerns directly to their political leaders.

Working with El Faro’s innovation manager Elmer Menjívar, Alvarez and his agency helped the news site develop a project that took advantage not just of the power of digital media, both El Faro’s website and social media, but also leveraged traditional media and advertising channels.

With a strong multi-channel marketing campaign and social media at its core, the campaign took in thousands of ideas to improve the country, engaging citizens in a novel way in their government.

The project shows how powerfully multi-platform projects can engage audiences no matter the media, and how the strengths of digital and traditional media can be combined to maximise effect.

Brainstorming how to engage the citizens of El Salvador

Traditionally, the media have been a one-way channel of communication, allowing political leaders to communicate to, or possibly more accurately at, the people.

“A newspaper, in this case a digital newspaper, always communicates what someone wants to say to the audience,” Alvarez said. They thought that they could reverse the roles and give the audience an opportunity to communicate their ideas to those “people who traditionally only give speeches, in this case, the government”, Alvarez added.

The advertising agency approached El Faro because it was “the only newspaper that could do something relevant … because of its reputation. You cannot do a campaign like this without the newspaper’s brand to back it up”.

From El Faro’s point of view, the timing of Alvarez’s idea couldn’t have been better because the digital newspaper had been wanting to figure out how social media fit with their brand of independent journalism, Menjívar said. They took Alvarez’s idea and ran with it.

“There is this global trend going on about citizens’ participation in journalism, and (El Faro) didn’t know if it would be a good idea for citizens to generate content for the newspaper and how to do it,” he added.

Citizen journalism has been a trend for years, and with the rise of social media and smartphones, more images, videos and updates that relate to current news stories are available. How would this project add value to what citizens were already saying? How would this project be focused so that El Faro could manage it?

Alvarez said, “(El Faro) didn’t want to make the mistake of putting citizens in the role of journalists, but instead let them be who they are.” They thought it would be more productive to simply let citizens be citizens and help them communicate their ideas to their leaders.

Key lesson: Don’t just follow the digital herd. It would have been too easy for El Faro to simply copy one of the many projects around the world developed by news organisations to let citizens have their say. Rather than simply copy an existing idea, they thought creatively about their goal of citizen participation in government and let that guide their thinking.

Twitter’s brevity as a strength

They could, of course, have simply provided a platform for El Salvadorans to comment on politics, but that was happening on social media services like Twitter, Facebook and blogs already.

Returning to Alvarez’s original idea that newspapers have traditionally been a one-way channel for politicians to communicate their ideas to the people, El Faro decided to open up a channel to allow the Salvadoran people to communicate, not just comments, but actionable ideas on how to make the country better to their leaders.

In creating the campaign, they decided to Twitter because they saw the 140-character limit of tweets as an advantage rather than a limitation. It would require people to be succinct and focused, Alvarez said. As El Faro co-founder Jorge Simán explained, they invited Salvadorans to “tweet your ideas because government officials have already said too much”.

“We knew that many people would want to participate so we couldn’t use something like Facebook because if you would give an idea to the government, it would probably be a very long idea so we needed to use only 140-characters so we could keep it simple,” Alvarez added.

It also made it easier to develop the platform that they used for the campaign. They turned to Happy Punk Panda Studios, a digital media and animation group, to create a simple application that allowed people to choose which branch of the Salvadoran government they wanted to speak to and what topic they wanted to address.

Happy Punk Panda wanted to be a part of the project because they believed in the idea and the effort, Alvarez said, adding, “they believed that they would gain not only exposure but they believed that they would be doing something (positive) for the country not just for the brand.”

In addition to simplifying development, Menjívar knew that Twitter’s hashtags would make it relatively easy for El Faro and its partners to collect the Twitter messages. Hashtags are keywords preceded by the # symbol. Twitter users often use hashtags to create a conversation around a topic or event. El Faro chose the hashtag #TuideaEF, “your idea” in Spanish and EF for El Faro.

It’s a perfect hashtag. When creating hashtags, you want to be succinct so that it does not take up too many of the 140 characters, and for a project like this, you want it to be unique.

With such a serious topic, they wanted to find a way to add a bit of humour and make it entertaining. “We asked ourselves again what was a resource that we have in the newspaper, something that is really, really part of a newspaper” that could add light and humour to the project, Alvarez said. They turned to the paper’s political cartoonist, Otto Meza.

The cartoons could add a touch of satire to the ideas that people submitted.

“Someone can say that we need to do something better with the transport services in the country, and the cartoonist could give it some sarcasm and make it a more powerful argument,” he said.

Key lesson: Most journalism organisations have a strong identity, and creating a project like this, while being innovative, needs to be a good fit with that identity. Alvarez and El Faro thought about how to leverage the identity and resources of the independent news site to drive the project rather than letting the project goals or the technology drive its development.

One of the 200 political cartoons created by Otto Meza. This Twitter user called on judges to publish their monthly hours and caseload.

A strong call to action

After six months of planning, they launched the campaign. Social campaigns like this require a strong call to action, and this is where partnering with an advertising agency gave El Faro a major boost in marketing the campaign.

The call to action was fun, irreverent and engaging. Cartoonist Meza created caricatures of major political figures and the previous and current presidents, saying, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

“Blah, blah, blah is a way to say in Spanish that you’re talking too much, that you’re talking nonsense,” Simán said.

You don’t need to speak Spanish to understand the message. Alvarez’s agency also had a strong presence in outdoor advertising and used the same idea for billboards and street-level cut-outs of the caricatures inviting people to participate.

Bridging the physical and digital, the street-level cut-outs also had QR codes, a square matrix barcode, that smartphone owners could scan to take them to the campaign application.

For the launch of the campaign in September 2011, El Faro invited prominent Salvadoran bloggers and Twitter users to an event (the article is translated from Spanish by Google) to help build buzz around the campaign.

As the campaign gained momentum, other media signed on. TV station Channel 33 agreed to run ads for free to support the campaign, and radio stations joined the effort too.

Key lesson: To succeed with a project like this, you’ll want a strong call to action for participants. After investing six months in planning this type of project, you’ll also want to give it the best chance of success by effectively marketing it.

‘A digital tool for participation’

The ideas came in a flood, and while the project was originally going to accept suggestions for six weeks, participants called for more time, and El Faro extended the campaign for two weeks. The comments came in not just from citizens living in El Salvador but also Salvadorans living in 100 countries around the world.

During that time, they took in 3,763 ideas directly speaking to the heads of district government, the judiciary, the national assembly and the president, Simán said.

Most of the comments had to do with governmental transparency, honesty and also being more open about how the government was using citizens’ money, Alvarez said.

The ideas not only focused on long-standing grievances but also current events. During the campaign, the country suffered floods after rain fell for 15 days, and one of the ideas that came from the campaign was to:

Create a risk and disaster evaluation ministry. We are one of the most vulnerable countries in the world.

Running the campaign in stages ensured the interest remained high even while Meza took on the herculean effort of transforming 200 tweets into cartoons.

“We thought we couldn’t ask people for their comments for eight weeks and then take two months without saying anything,” Alvarez said. That would have risked losing the momentum behind the campaign. Instead, they decided to show the process Meza took to capture the 200 ideas during the two months he spent illustrating them.

They printed 200 illustrations and 1,000 other ideas submitted during the campaign, creating “The comic book of what you always wanted to tell the government”. The book was a success, selling out its first print run of several thousand copies.

Part of the success of the campaign has to be down to the fact that El Faro didn’t simply collect the ideas, they didn’t just create a book with them – they also promised to do something with them. They told their readers and campaign participants that they would deliver the comments to the political leaders that they were addressed to, and El Faro was able to keep its promise, delivering one of the comic books to district leaders, judicial leaders and the Head of the National Assembly.

“They received the book, and they said it would help them amend some of the mistakes that they had probably made in the past. That was a very political answer. The only (political leader) who didn’t receive it and didn’t give a response was the President of the country,” Menjívar said. This was despite numerous calls to key representatives, including his campaign manager and contacts El Faro had in his office.

The irony is that he is a former journalist who had his own television programme and, as President, he has his own radio programme. However, El Faro’s readers weren’t surprised at the President’s rebuff of the campaign, he added. He hasn’t given El Faro a single interview since he was elected in 2009.

The multi-platform campaign broke new ground in the country in terms of digital media as well as effectively leveraging the power of print and multiple advertising channels, and was successful on many levels:

• The campaign increased traffic to El Faro, increased subscribers to its email news service and dramatically increased its following on Twitter and Facebook.
• The campaign brought global attention to El Faro and Publicidad Comercial Lowe & Partners.
• The campaign became only the third in the history of El Salvador to be shortlisted for the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising awards, and last year, the project took second in the editorial content category of the prestigious El Ojo Iberoamericano awards.

As with many examples of successful media projects in the 21st Century, this wasn’t a case of digital or traditional media but rather digital and traditional media.

PBS MediaShift looked at a new report on mobile developments and their impact in Africa.

The report from the Center for International Media Assistance and the National Endowment for Democracy was primarily focused on international media assistance and international broadcasters, such as the US government-backed Voice of America, but it contains insights for domestic African media as well.

Gabrielle Gauthey, executive vice president of the global telecommunications company Alcatel Lucent:

In 2000, you had about 5 million mobile phones in Africa. Today, we have about 500 million. In 2015, we expect it to be 800 million. Already, 20 to 30 percent of these phones are Internet-enabled. In 2015, it will be 80 percent.

In the report (available in full in PDF), Guy Berger, UNESCO’s director of freedom of expression and media development and a former newspaper editor, “predicted that mobile devices will surpass broadcast receivers as the continent’s primary medium”.

The mobile revolution in Africa is well documented, but the study also looked at another trend: rapid urbanisation. They believe this will transform the African media market. The report begins by saying:

Africa will become predominantly urban within 20 years, according to a United Nations report, with cities tripling in size and megacities developing throughout the continent. This suggests significant changes for Africans’ consumption of media in general and digital media in particular, with implications for Africa’s cities, politics, and civil society.

The pace and scale of the shift to the cities in sub-Saharan Africa is unlike anything else seen before in history. In a few decades, Africa will be predominantly urban.

Key media trends

With this growth of mobile, and the shift to cities, the study identified a few key trends that African media executives and publishers need to be aware of:

• The “use of cellphones and other mobile devices, already widespread, are becoming a nearly universal platform, not only for telephony but also for audio and video information and entertainment”.
• Fragmentation of demand driven by fewer people per television and radio receiver “enabling and encouraging more individually customized media consumption”.
• Urbanisation driving fragmentation of supply. “Competing media sources are far more numerous in African cities than in rural areas.”

The “shift from radio and television receivers to … mobile telephones and other mobile digital devices” has led to “an entirely new and largely unrecognised class of independent media.”

The study suggests that current changes in patterns of media consumption in sub-Saharan Africa will accelerate with urbanisation, helping to reinforce the effect of mobile media adoption as city dwellers in Africa have a higher rate of mobile phone ownership than rural dwellers.

Urbanisation isn’t the only demographic shift that will affect media consumption. The report also noted that of the top 40 countries in terms of fertility rates, 38 are in Africa. This will lead to a dramatic increase in young Africans. The study believes that this will mean:

More people means larger media use, and that in turn translates into greater support for media of all kinds, from advertiser- and subscription-supported media to cellphone ownership. And more young people translates into greater embrace of new media technologies.

African audience on the move

The move to mobile media consumption is clear. For the first time in late 2011, the Voice of America found that more Africans were accessing its website via mobile phone rather than on computers. Broadcasting still has a larger reach, but since 2009, “Voice of America has discovered it is serving a very large audience for video on mobile telephones, especially in Kenya”.

The report believes that urbanisation and the rapid expansion of mobile handsets and mobile data will open up opportunities for independent media. Urbanisation will increase the number and competition amongst media outlets, while mobile will provide media with the ability to engage audiences that remain in rural areas.

The VOA, like other traditional broadcasters, has responded to these shifts by training hundreds of citizen journalists, increasing its use of social media and adding to its digital services targeting mobile phones and computers.

International and domestic news organisations will also have to compete with non-traditional sources of news and information. The report highlighted Google’s efforts to provide more information for sub-Saharan Africa via country-specific versions of Google News as well as information and education offerings via its video platform YouTube. Of course, the report notes that Google doesn’t need a broadcasting licence to offer its service in a country, like a radio or TV broadcaster might.

Digital information innovation is not just driven by large international companies like Google but increasingly a number of innovative projects and companies starting in Africa. The report highlights several, including the crowdsourced reporting platform, Ushahidi and also the virtual noticeboard service, Mimiboard. Mimiboard allows people to post information via the web or text messaging, and already media groups and NGOs have started using it, including the London-based news site The Zimbabwean, written by journalists in exile.

How media are responding

In response to the mobile revolution, new forms of media are being developed such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR). The free or inexpensive service allows people “to leave recorded messages, field questions and answers, and to provide market updates and weather reports.”

VOA is “aggressively pursuing IVR to complement streaming,” said Steve Ferri, the web managing editor of VOA Africa and head of VOA Mobile and Digital Media Africa. VOA is finding that African audiences are not simply using their mobile phones for brief bits of content and interaction but rather listening to full 20-minute programmes on their mobile phones.

Reinforcing one of the observations of the study, that content would become more individual with the rise of mobile, Ferri said that “deeply, deeply personal content is the sweet spot” on mobile. Research has found that dating, ring tones, horoscopes and the Bible and Koran are all popular forms of content, Ferri said, adding that jobs, entrepreneurship and English language instruction are also popular.

The digital transition is definitely happening in sub-Saharan Africa, and mobile technology is driving this transition. New forms of independent media and entirely new forms of media, such as IVR, are being developed to take advantage of this trend, but the study concludes that what we’ve seen thus far will only accelerate as the penetration of mobile phones with data connections increases in the next few years and more Africans move to cities. It’s a good time to review your digital editorial and revenue strategies to take advantage of these new opportunities to reach and serve audiences.

The survey found that 47 percent of internet users in Brazil and 44 percent in Argentina read UGC on newspaper websites compared to only 35 percent in the UK and 26 percent in Germany. Latin Americans also submit articles or comments on the websites of newspaper publishers at higher rates than people in other regions, with 27 percent in Brazil and 26 percent in Argentina. Across the region, there was an increase from 11.9 percent to 23.4 percent of internet users engaging with UGC between 2010 and 2011, whereas the percentage of internet users in the UK and Germany submitting comments or articles to news sites declined over the same period, falling to 12 percent and 17 percent respectively.

Across Latin America, UGC engagement levels as well as blogging and posting behaviour vary significantly by country. According to Jimena Urquijo, VP Business Development of Kantar Media-TGI Latina, this depends on a mix of factors like internet penetration and the use of new devices to go online. “The larger the internet base, the more potential for UGC development,” she says, explaining Latin America’s lead in online interactivity by the region’s dramatic increase in internet accessibility over the last couple of years.

Overall the Latin American online population grew faster than any other region in 2011, rising 16 percent to 129.3 m in December 2011, according to the 2012 Latin American Digital Future in Focus report by ComScore. Brazil, the largest online market in Latin America, grew 20 percent in the past year to 40.5 m users, while Mexico’s online population surged 21 percent to 18.1 m. And Venezuela, which represents a relatively small online market at 2.9 m, achieved the highest rate of growth in the past year at 27 percent. As Urquijo explains, the path for this growth is paved by the increased usage of internet-enabled devices such as mobile phones, consoles and iPads. ComScore reports that internet usage on mobile phones and tablets continued to increase in 2011, with Puerto Rico leading the region with 7.7 percent of all digital traffic consumed away from a personal computer.

Another important element of the high level UGC engagement in Latin America, Urquijo emphasizes, is cultural. “Latin American consumers are outspoken, informed and have well rounded opinions,” she says. Close to 83 percent of Latin American internet users believe it is important to be well-informed. And they place less importance in trusting online media than in other regions. When asked how important it was that they trust the websites they visit, only 73 percent of internet users in Brazil and 71 percent in Argentina agreed that it was important, Kantar Media reports. In comparison, 82 percent thought trust was important in Saudi Arabia and 80 percent in Kuwait. This factor may help to explain the acceptance of and willingness to contribute to content production in the region.

The result is that even smaller Latin American markets, like Peru with 9.9 m internet users as of 2011, have embraced new communication forms like social networking and UCG. Peru is now one of the most engaged social networking markets worldwide along with four other Latin America countries – Argentina, Chile, Columbia and Mexico. Since 2008, Peru has had its own citizen-generated newspaper, Gua 3.0 – the first of its kind in the region – which aims to report facts that mainstream media miss.

This growing appetite for UGC presents an opportunity for news outlets to attract new audiences and build relationships with existing audiences. Providing consumers with easy ways to interact and contribute to the news-making process builds loyalty and can be an audience-building tool. Geoff Wicken, Head of TGO International at Kantar Media agrees:

Today’s digital world has enabled consumers to move from being passive recipients of news coverage to playing an interactive role in how news is distributed. While the doomsayers take this to signal the end of the traditional newspaper, savvy publishers understand that they need to encourage and engage with people providing content, and use it as means of underpinning their role in this ‘Brave New World’.

It was a pivotal moment in journalism, and soon everyone was talking about citizen journalism, although the term still is hotly debated. Many ask whether these random acts of journalism make one a journalist or simply empower an ever larger number of people to record an event. Regardless, the fact stands that billions of people around the world now carry a camera phone in their pocket. When something happens, they now have a way to document the story, and it is undeniable that this has caused a huge shift in how stories are reported.

The revenge of the voiceless

With the mobile phone revolution now truly a global phenomenon, it is not surprising that mobile phones are now remaking media everywhere. On Monday, there was a bombing amongst the shopping stalls in Nairobi. Charles Onyango-Obbo, executive editor of the Africa Media Division, wrote for Nation newspaper that he instantly realised that he was witnessing an historic shift in coverage of the event. People didn’t instinctively run away but instead pulled out their mobile phones and tablets and started recording the event. Onyango-Obbo wrote:

It used to be that when things went boom, people rushed home and waited for TV journalists to tell them what happened, and for newspapers to delve into the story the next morning. …How things have changed! The Moi Avenue blast went off around 1.15pm. If you were on the Internet, by 3.15pm, you would probably already have had enough of the story.

Something profound is happening, Onyango-Obbo said. In the past, events would be told from the perspective of the powerful as journalists interviewed politicians, generals, religious leaders, the rich and the trend setters.

Technology has rescued history from this cartel. … The voiceless are taking their revenge. The social media and the blogosphere are often criticised as a factory of rumours and gossip. That is true. However, rumours are nothing more than resistance to government opaqueness, business secrecy, and the power and privilege that shield the powerful from scrutiny and accountability.

Many in journalism have seen this change as a threat, but others have embraced the desire of people to record an event and share it with others.  CNN collects public photos, video and reports on their iReport platform and, if the report is especially good, it invites the citizen reporters on air. That’s a great strategy for TV and radio stations of any size. If you get a good picture or report from a member of the public, or if you see one on a social network, get them on air. It’s a great and proven strategy for tapping into people witnessing an event and sharing it on the internet. Building up a relationship with your audience as the go-to point when news breaks is key.

Along those lines, Malaysiakini CEO Premesh Chandran spoke at the 2010 MDLF Media Forum about how they have run an extensive citizen journalism training programme to “harness the power of citizen journalism”.

The mobile revolution combined with the ease of sharing a photo or video is remaking journalism. It dramatically increases the possibility that you will see footage of event. Just think of the US flight that landed on the Hudson River in New York or all of the footage that we saw from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. With this example from Kenya, that trend is now spreading across the world, and there are a lot of ways that you can take advantage of this trend to add to your coverage and deepen your relationship with your audience.