Instead of filing traditional news reports about Syria to traditional outlets like ABC News and Bloomberg, foreign correspondent Lara Setrakian decided to start her own dedicated news site about the conflict in the war-torn country — part of an ongoing trend towards the unbundling of the media. Read more »
Syria, which is engaged in a citizen revolt, has been cut off from the Internet according to several reports. This tactic isn’t all that difficult implement and is becoming more common, making the need for new open source technologies for wireless communications necessary. Read more »
Citizen journalism and social-media tools have made it easier to get information out of countries like Egypt and Syria, but in some cases these reports may not be true. Does that mean citizen journalism is unreliable? No. It just means we need to approach it differently. Read more »
Western media lost an important ally in their attempts to report from Syria today, as citizen journalist Rami Ahmad Alsayeed was killed by armed forcers only hours after streaming live from the city of Homs. Alsayeed’s footage had been used by the BBC and Al Jazeera. Read more »
Syria blocked access to live streaming site Bambuser on Thursday, cutting off one of the last windows into the embattled city of Homs, which has been under attack for days. This follows similar efforts by other regimes to suppress citizen coverage of the Arab Spring. Read more »
A Scottish man has revealed he’s the writer behind a blog detailing the life of a gay Syrian woman. But as the inquest begins into how he fooled the world’s media and thousands of readers, can we really insulate ourselves from fakes and liars? Read more »
As violence against pro-democracy demonstrators and other civilians is intensifying in Syria, YouTube is increasingly becoming the primary media outlet to learn about the situation in the country. Censorship against YouTube was lifted only two months ago, but now reports about phone network outages emerge. Read more »
