Washington Post  publisher Philip Graham famously described journalism as the “first rough draft of history” in a speech to Newsweek  correspondents in 1963 — but as a new research paper from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism notes, that role is increasingly being played by social media such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. The latest example is the coverage of the Osama bin Laden raid, which triggered questions about whether the person sharing news via social media was a journalist or not. As the Reuters paper confirms, those kinds of questions are becoming increasingly moot, as journalism is distributed to anyone with a smartphone.

Nicola Bruno did the research for the Reuters Institute during a recent fellowship at Oxford, and focused on the reporting of the earthquake in Haiti in January of last year, which Foreign Policy associate editor Joshua Keating has called “the first Twitter disaster.” Based on interviews with a number of other journalists and media analysts, Bruno draws a direct link between the way CNN changed the nature of media during the Gulf War, and the way Twitter has changed reporting and journalism:

CNN coverage… soon became emblematic of what several experts defined as the CNN effect — that is, according to Joseph Nye [former Secretary of Defense and head of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard], “the impact of the increased free flow of broadcast information and shortened news cycles on public opinion in free societies.”

As quoted in Bruno’s paper (a PDF version of which is here), journalist Nik Gowing argues, “in a moment of a crisis, what is the difference — if any — between the staff reporter who observes, writes, blogs, then files an article for an established media organisation, and the motivated amateur or quasi-professional who does exactly the same for a web or blog site?” This is exactly the debate that has been taking place about Sohaib Athar, the Pakistani computer programmer who live-tweeted the recent U.S. military raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

As we’ve pointed out before, what Bruno and the media sources he interviewed for his research paper are describing is the dismantling of what we call journalism into its component parts, and the creation of a new ecosystem of news. Some of this is performed by amateurs or “citizen journalists” — in what Andy Carvin of NPR has called “random acts of journalism” — and some is performed by traditional or mainstream writers, editors and curators. Guardian writer and live-blogger Matthew Weaver describes the process to Bruno as: “first the tweets come, then the pictures, then the video, and then the wires.”

While some traditional journalists don’t seem to like this phenomenon (as the comments on this Poynter Institute piece illustrate), Bruno points out in his paper that all of this “crowdsourced” content can help media organizations fill what some call the “news vacuum” that often follows spontaneous news events such as the Haiti earthquake, when traditional journalists are still trying to get to the location of the disaster. CNN, in particular, has made good use of Twitter reports, Flickr photos and YouTube videos in such situations, says Bruno, along with other content contributed through its iReport “citizen journalism” platform, while the BBC has a “user-generated content” hub specifically designed to pull in those kinds of reports.

One of the issues Bruno’s paper looks at is whether the rush to fill that vacuum of real-time news is having a negative effect on the accuracy of the news. He concludes it is, saying there is some reason to believe the acceleration of the news cycle:

is eroding the journalistic standards of the reliability and verification of the news. The various interviews and analysis gathered in this research paper illustrates how… The Guardian and CNN chose speed versus verification for spreading their information. The “tweet first, verify later” approach is a great help for source diversification and leads to richer coverage. But this strategy also seems very dangerous for one of journalism’s golden rules: each news story must be verified first.

This makes it even more important that traditional media outlets focus on verifying these kinds of reports, says Bruno — who predicts that more reporters will become “reporter-curators” (a job Andy Carvin at NPR is arguably helping to define by doing just that during the recent events in the Middle East), and use the content from Twitter and other social media as the source material for more comprehensive reporting or journalism. Former foreign correspondent Burt Herman built Storify to make this easier for bloggers and journalists.

Bruno’s paper makes for a fascinating play-by-play of how social media helped define the reporting of a significant news event. And despite the errors and mis-information that can occur, he argues one of the benefits of the “Twitter effect” is it “promotes an idea (and practice) of a journalism more oriented to the process of news-making and more open to a diversity of sources than traditional mainstream coverage.” That’s the real lesson of how social media is changing media: It’s making it more open, and allowing for many different sources, and that’s fundamentally a positive change.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of NBC photographer Richard Engel and Flickr user Yan Arief

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Today is the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed an estimated 230,000 people and has left millions of others homeless. As in some other recent catastrophes, social media such as Twitter, text messaging, interactive online maps and other tools such as crowdsourcing were used by both victims and rescue workers to co-ordinate relief efforts. But did they help? The Knight Foundation has released a comprehensive study of the use of technology during the aftermath of the quake, and found that while there is still a lot of work to be done, such tools can make rescue efforts and aid far easier and faster.

Haiti quickly became what the report describes as “a living laboratory for new applications such as SMS, interactive online maps and radio-cell phone hybrids.” But while many of the tools were extremely useful in transmitting crucial information, this information often wasn’t used as well as it could have been, for a variety of reasons. The report notes:

As new media activists have pointed out, “Technology is easy, community is hard.” Many of the obstacles to the relief efforts concerned difficulties in dialogue between communities: between international organizations and local Haitian groups, between volunteers and professional humanitarian organizations and between civilians and military.

and

While the democratic approach to information management fuels crowdsourcing, this characteristic can also serve as a limitation in crisis settings. Information may be gathered and assembled in an open, democratic fashion. But often the practical response effort is driven by large organizations that deal with information in a radically different way. Military and international humanitarian organizations manage information within more closed systems.

One of the most powerful new-media and online tools used in the relief efforts, the Knight report says, was Ushahidi — a service that was developed in Kenya in 2007, and can be used to aggregate and process information that comes in from a variety of sources such as SMS, Twitter and radio, and then plot the information on a map. The service “developed an RSS feed for the U.S. Coast Guard to help them retrieve emergency information [and] a team of four to eight Coast Guard responders retrieved the information and disseminated it to forces on the ground.” A group of students at Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science converted the Ushahidi data to Google Earth file formats.

Crowdsourcing also played a large role in the aftermath of the disaster, the report says. Two weeks after the earthquake, the labor-on-demand company CrowdFlower took over management of the workflow of volunteers to “translate, classify and geocode the messages” coming in via the short-code 4636. Later, an outsourcing company called Samasource took over the bulk of the translation and coding work in co-operation with a local Haiti-based group. And accurate maps of the country and the location of survivors and victims were also crowdsourced using the OpenStreetMap standard.

One of the biggest problems of crisis response in developing countries lies in finding locations that do not appear on any maps. In some cases, the maps have never been made; in others, rural populations have crowded into urban areas so quickly that maps soon become outdated. These problems were addressed in Haiti by another notable development in information technology: the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Haiti mapping initiative.

Although social media and other tools were important, the report makes a point of cautioning that the Haiti relief effort shouldn’t be seen as a “new-media success story,” because some of the new approaches used did not work very well, due to a lack of co-ordination — and in many cases a lack of understanding of how to use the tools. For example, U.S. Air Force Col. Lee Harvis, the chief medical officer who landed in Port-au-Prince 36 hours after the earthquake, said he had no knowledge of Ushahidi, and neither did any of the other military doctors operating in the country.

The Knight Foundation report (which was co-produced with Internews) also noted that despite all the new media tools, the single most important tool in Haiti was one that has also been crucial in almost every other major disaster in the past 50 years: namely, traditional radio broadcasting. However, the report’s authors noted that social media and other tools helped spread the information farther than radio would otherwise have been able, and that this was an important aspect of the relief efforts.

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Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

If you want to see a Twitter mob in its larval stage, just do a search on Zynga or Farmville and Haiti and you will see one emerging over a report that the social-gaming company kept 50 percent of the money that it raised in donations for the country in the wake of a devastating earthquake. The report originally appeared in a Brazilian magazine called Superinteressante, which did a feature on Zynga and Farmville and mentioned in the piece that it had only given 50 percent of what it raised to Haiti. That was in turn picked up by a leading Brazilian newspaper called Folha de Sao Paulo , which said that Zynga had admitted to only sending 50 percent of the money it raised for Haiti to that country.

That story got written about in several places around the Web, including at Social Media Today (in a post that has since been removed and replaced with a different one featuring an altered headline) as well as at the opinion site True/Slant, where Marcelo Ballve — a former Associated Press reporter in Brazil — summarized the Falho story about how Zynga had misled Farmville players into thinking 100 percent of their donations would be going to Haiti for earthquake relief (he has since posted an update). The story was also written up at Gawker, which also repeated the allegations.

The Folha story, however, blurs together two Farmville campaigns to raise money for Haiti: One was set up before the earthquake, and specifically said that only 50 percent of the money raised would be sent to Haiti (a screenshot is embedded below). The second, which involved the purchase within the game of special “white corn” for a user’s farm, said that 100 percent of the proceeds would be sent to earthquake relief. According to an emailed statement from a Zynga spokesperson that I’ve embedded below, this is exactly what happened (a similar statement has been posted at the bottom of both the True/Slant post and the Folha story, and referred to by Gawker, but not by Social Media Today, although the latter has since posted an update and apology). The initial campaign for Haiti raised $1.2-million for the country, and the subsequent “white corn” campaign raised an additional $1.5-million.

Meanwhile, dozens of Twitter messages are still being posted every minute (based on a recent survey of the social network) saying that Zynga “admits to keeping half the money it raised for Haiti,” despite the repeated efforts by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus to rebut such claims through his own Twitter account. The eagerness with which people seem to believe such claims could have something to do with the language barrier between the initial reports and those who have repeated them — but it could also be a result of some negative press that Zynga has received in the past, alleging “scammy” behavior related to lead-generation offers within its games.

If nothing else, Zynga’s current woes are just another example of social media’s ability to spread both information and misinformation at lightning-fast speeds. For another recent example, see our report about the “death” of folk legend Gordon Lightfoot.

http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=27839271&access_key=key-zqvuv9o693cxpolgbn4&page=1&viewMode=list

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Rusty Boxcars.

It’s a simple exchange: Fans give whatever amount they can to DWB’s efforts in Haiti following last month’s devastating earthquake, and in exchange for their donations, they’ll receive access to three new College Humor shorts: a Jake and Amir installment, a Hardly Working skit and a commercial parody shot in 2008 that was deemed too offensive for the official site. These videos, made exclusively for LOLaid, will never be uploaded to CH’s official site or YouTube, making a suggested $5 donation the only way to watch.

LOLaid is College Humor’s first charity project, though site staff had discussed similar initiatives in the past. “This was finally an opportunity for us to sit down and say ‘How are we going to do this?’,” editor Jeff Rubin said via phone. But while the legal and logistical complications of raising money for charity held them back in the past, Firstgiving helped simplify the process: “They made it very easy for us to set up a separate fundraising page. They’re collecting the money for us and it’s going directly where it’s needed,” he said.

Firstgiving also doesn’t require a minimum donation, meaning that College Humor’s core audience of college students (who tend not to be flush with cash) could contribute as little as $1 and still get involved. So far, it’s working — in the fundraiser’s first day online, College Humor has raised almost $2,000 of its $10,000 goal, with the vast majority of those donations ranging from $1-$10. The comments are predictably sophomoric, but the cause is good, the money is piling up — and after donating and watching the videos, I can say that the content is definitely worth whatever you can spare. Because even if you hate Jake and Amir, you really can’t hate a good cause.

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Max Woolley, a father working in the area with a humanitarian aid group prior to the disaster, was buried under rubble for about 60 hours after the earthquake struck. During the quake, Woolley received fairly serious injuries to both his head and his leg. Luckily, he also had an app that dealt specifically with how to treat and respond to such injuries.

The app was Pocket First Aid & CPR, created by the American Heart Association in tandem with Jive Media. It allows users to browse a variety of first aid techniques and practices, provides emergency numbers, stores medical info such as blood type, insurance providers and emergency contacts, and instructs users on what to do in various emergency situations. Techniques are demonstrated using a combination of text instructions and videos of the procedures being done correctly. Probably a better bet than depending on that vaguely-remembered first aid course you took five months ago.

Woolley used the app to look up the correct method of treating his wounds. He learned to bandage his leg with his shirt and then tie-off the wound with his belt to slow the bleeding. For his head injury, the app told him not to fall asleep in case of concussion, so he set his iPhone’s alarm to go off every 20 minutes. Of course, the iPhone’s battery wasn’t up to the challenge of being almost perpetually in use for 60 hours, but Woolley says then when he did have to turn it off to conserve what little battery remained, his body was used to the cycle and wouldn’t drift off to sleep for longer than a few minutes at a time.

The app is a $3.99 purchase, but Woolley clearly thinks the money was well spent. There are other, free first aid applications available, but it was the American Heart Association connection that gave Woolley the confidence to follow the advice contained within to the letter. According to CNN, he said his phone “was like a high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife that enabled me to treat my own injuries, track time, stay awake and stay alive.”

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Tomorrow, Jan. 20, Indie+Relief will be taking all of the sale proceedings from a range of applications and be giving them to select charities. The impressive list of applications on offer include the likes of image editor Acorn, MarketCircle’s Billings, cataloging software Delicious Library 2, web statistics manager Ego, FTP client Flow, newsreader Instapaper Pro, to-do list Things, Twitter client Twitterific and many, many more.

The project started only a few days ago and has been made possible due to a joint collaboration between developers Garret Murray and Second Gear. Since they announced the project, a whole host of other developers from the Mac and iPhone community have gotten involved, with the Indie+Relief site now listing over 130 applications. Developers partaking in the fundraising all had the opportunity to select any charity of their choice, all of which will benefit the Haiti aid process. Popular charities include The Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF.

If you are in the market to buy any of the listed applications, then be sure to take the plunge this coming Wednesday, as all of the proceeds will go to Haitian aid organizations. And if you’re not, be sure to check out Indie+Relief anyway as you may just find something new!

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Corrected Tuesday 4 p.m. PT. A week after a massive earthquake struck Haiti, the country’s terrible devastation continues to captivate and motivate onlookers — and one of the simplest and best-publicized ways to help is to send a $5 or $10 donation through a text message. Combined, the two major mobile giving platforms, mGive and the Mobile Giving Foundation, have raised $42 $27 million via text message commitments from Americans and Canadians. Initially, as we reported, those mobile donations faced 90-day delays to reach Haiti, based on the emergent industry’s practices of billing subscribers via their carriers during their normal payment cycle.

However now the four major American carriers have all committed to making an exception, passing the donations on to Haiti more quickly. Verizon kicked it off with $2.98 million sent to Haiti on Friday (the total of its customers’ mobile giving at that time). Sprint said, also on Friday, it would send 80 percent of the $1.2 million its customers had donated to Haiti immediately, with the rest to follow. T-Mobile said Monday on a customer support forum that it aimed to get funds to Haiti by “this week.” And a spokesperson for AT&T told us via email, “Yes, we will advance payment of verified texted donations to the Red Cross for Haiti relief as soon as possible.” He said AT&T customers had pledged more than $9 million to the Red Cross via text as of Monday afternoon.

Carriers are also waiving text message fees for the Haiti donation process, in which a user texts a keyword like “Haiti” or “quake” to a short code, then receives a response, confirms the donation, and then receives a thank you — for a total of four text messages.

The Mobile Giving Foundation said in a press release that it continues to see the rate of mobile donations rise, with $3.5 million donated on Sunday alone for a total of more than $20 $27 million raised. mGive said separately it is processing more than $10,000 per minute in text donations at peak, and has seen $22 $23 million pledged to the Red Cross (the vast majority of all American mobile donations). The Haiti fundraising effort is easily the largest mobile giving campaign to date.

After the dust settles, the carriers and the mobile giving facilitators will have to establish better processes for mobile fundraising. While it makes complete sense to expedite desperately needed disaster relief funding, there’s a risk of opening the door to money transfer for unverified causes, and pre-authorizing donations on which subscribers then default.

Correction: This article originally treated the amounts raised by the Mobile Giving Foundation and mGive as two separate figures. However, the Mobile Giving Foundation included mGive’s fundraising totals in the numbers it released. We have corrected the story with new numbers, accurate as of Tuesday afternoon.

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The flipside is that it can be hard to know exactly which methods are legit, and in which cases the bulk of your donation actually goes to relief work. Apple and the Red Cross have set up a method for donating money that makes it very simple to make a contribution that will go entirely towards helping Haitians deal with the fallout of this tragic event; you can now donate via iTunes.

At the U.S. and Canadian iTunes stores, and at many European ones, too all you have to do is follow this link and you’ll be taken to a Red Cross donation splash page. You can then choose from six different preset donation amounts, including $5, $10, $25, $50, $100 and $200. Clicking the “Donate” button beneath any amount will then prompt the “Sign in to buy” dialog, where you’ll confirm your iTunes account credentials in order to finalize the donation.

Apple explains where your donation is going and to what end on the donation page:

100% of your donation will go to the American Red Cross (…) Your donation of any size could help save the day by providing food, water, temporary shelter, medical services and emotional support to someone in need.

In the even that the American Red Cross reaches its target for the Haiti Earthquake Appeal, any excess donations will be applied to other American Red Cross efforts. Further information about the American Red Cross and its financial administration can be found at http://www.RedCross.org.

A quick test reveals that the iTunes link to the donation page does not work on the iPhone or iPod touch iTunes store at this time. If you do want to donate from your mobile device, the best way is probably still via text message. Texting “HAITI” to 90999 will donate $10 to the relief efforts on many U.S. carriers, although it won’t work for international donations.

Haiti is nowhere near out of the woods yet, so if you haven’t yet contributed, or if you’d just like to do it again, and donate more than the max $20 or $30 that most carriers allow for the texting method, the iTunes store is a safe and easy way to help out.

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The hosting site’s official blog and CitizenTube are compiling the stories of survivors and footage of relief efforts in action. One of the very first videos to make it online, footage from the town of Les Cayes, has reached over one million views.

Tracy Reines, Director of the International Response Operations Center at the American Red Cross, has been doing video updates on the Red Cross’s response to the disaster. There’s no visual flair to these videos — she’s simply standing in front of a map and speaking directly to the camera. But there are interesting details about how the Red Cross is attempting to get supplies and aid into the country given the devastation done to its infrasructure.

Oxfam Great Britain has a similar approach to their updates, though they’re also using in-video annotations as well as overlay ads similar to the Red Cross to enable donations.

Actually showing what’s happening in the country is possibly the best way to convince people to donate, and as video and photos flood in the need clearly grows. So, if you’re looking for a list of organizations which need support, as well as tips on donating in a crisis, Charity Navigator has you covered.

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The Red Cross, whose campaign is being publicized by the White House and the U.S. State Department, is accepting $10 donations via texting “Haiti” to 90999 in a program powered by Mobile Accord’s mGive. As of this morning, that campaign alone had raised $3 million (see the map image below for a distribution of donations). The State Department had actually been responsible for initiating the Red Cross campaign with a call to Mobile Accord chairman James Eberhard (who had met Secretary Clinton at a dinner earlier this month, but got the call while traveling in Pakistan this week). It was activated at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday and had raised $800,000 by 3 p.m. Wednesday.

$3 million easily tops mGive’s previous record of $450,000 donated to Alicia Keys’ children foundation, which was publicized through “American Idol.” The Mobile Giving Foundation, which is powering Wyclef’s parallel campaign and has not yet released Haiti totals, said it expected to raise a total of $2 million in all of 2009. Both organizations say neither they nor mobile carriers are taking a cut from the Haiti donations.

However both Mobile Accord (which is a for-profit company, but operates 100 percent pass-through mobile donation campaigns through the mGive Foundation) and the Mobile Giving Foundation admit it usually takes 90 days from the time of donation to the time it is received by the intended charity, in part because they are collected through each customer’s normal cell phone billing cycle. That’s eons in disaster recovery time.

Earlier today mGive posted to Twitter, “We are currently working with the carriers to reduce this window. We will tweet when he have an update on this.” A spokesperson for mGive added via email, “It would be inaccurate to talk about them as ‘carrier’ delays. The delays are just in the business processes that were set up when the mobile giving channel was created. Like all new systems, it will improve as we grow and learn.”

A spokesperson for Verizon — which like most carriers is waiving SMS fees for Haiti donations — told DailyFinance, “We understand the need to get this money into the pipeline ASAP and we’re looking at ways to do that internally. People want to give now, and the money needs to get there as soon as possible.”

Sounds like a plan. C’mon carriers — let’s get cracking!

Update: Around noon PT Friday, Verizon Wireless said it had advanced $2.98 million in mobile donations committed by its customers to Haiti. “Time is of the essence, and it makes sense for us to toss aside our normal financial processes to get money where it can do the most good, in the fastest way possible,” said Verizon Wireless president and CEO Lowell McAdam in a statement.

Update 2 (Tuesday, Jan. 19): The four major American carriers now say they are all committed to getting text donations to Haiti quickly.

Haiti-related mobile fundraising campaigns, via Mobile Giving Insider:

* Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross
* Text HAITI to 25383 to donate $5 to International Rescue Committee
* Text HAITI to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army in Canada
* Text YELE to 501501 to donation $5 to Yele
* Text RELIEF to 30644 to get automatically connected to Catholic Relief Services and donate money with your credit card
* Text HAITI to 864833 to donate $5 to The United Way
* Text CERF to 90999 to donate $5 to The United Nations Foundation
* Text DISASTER to 90999 to donate $10 to Compassion International

Photo for the feature slot courtesy of mGive. You can send your money using their website as well.

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