As Fast Company described in a recent piece about the venture, which launched earlier this week, Syria Deeply began when founder Lara Setrakian — a foreign correspondent who had worked for outlets like ABC News and Bloomberg covering the conflict for the past several years — decided that telling the story of Syria required more than just filing occasional reports to TV or newspapers. In a sense, she told the magazine, the story was almost too large to fit into the typical packages or rhetorical devices used by the mainstream media. As Setrakian describes it:

“The user experience of the Syria story sucked. It was just abysmal. It was bits and pieces, very hard for the end user (being the news consumer) to take it and process it and come to any kind of synthesis.”

A technology platform dedicated to a specific story

After seeing the crowdsourced-information tool Ushahidi, which was built during the turmoil in Kenya in 2008 as a way of collecting data from ordinary citizens as well as emergency personnel, Setrakian convinced the builders of the service to help her design what became the Syria Deeply site. In many ways, it looks like a typical online news site: it has headlines about recent stories, it has a video unit, it has related messages from Twitter and it has links to opinion pieces — but instead of it being about all the news in a specific town or city, it is all about Syria.

So one recent item is what amounts to a transcript of a phone call with a Syrian university student, a woman from a conservative Sunni family in Aleppo who has journeyed from that city to her family’s home in Idleb, and who simply describes what she encountered on the road — the “liberated” villages and Islamic jihadist checkpoints she had to go through, the lack of food in Aleppo, and other details. It’s not a traditional news story by any means, but it is very revealing.

The site also has audio reports and interviews uploaded with SoundCloud, which is one of the technology providers that Setrakian has partnered with — a group that also includes Google+ for Hangouts and the presentation tool Prezi. According to Fast Company, about 75 percent of the content is aggregated or automated in some way, but the other 25 percent is original content, whether based on interviews or reports from sources that Setrakian and her team have in the region.

Topic niches are what the internet does best

In a sense, what Setrakian — who is funding the site herself, along with a crowdfunding effort through Indiegogo — has done with Syria Deeply is similar to what technology bloggers like John Gruber of Daring Fireball have done: namely, focus on a single niche and try to dominate that topic. It’s a little like taking a section of a newspaper or a column or feature from a magazine and ripping it out and making it a separate website. I think it’s part of the same trend that designer Craig Mod recently described as “sub-compact media,” which strips down content to its component parts.

And why not do that? Aggregating news about hundreds of different topics for a broad, mainstream audience is something that was invented to fit the publication model of a newspaper, not the internet. There’s an argument to be made that focusing on a specific niche actually makes it easier to attract revenue opportunities — although a site about Syria might be more difficult than a blog about Apple (Setrakian says she is hoping to sell the insight the site develops to companies and other organizations).

What other topics might deserve a dedicated site or service like Syria Deeply? Instead of trying to aggregate as much content as possible, maybe some newspapers and other traditional publishers should be thinking about how to create similar topic-specific sites that can stand on their own. As Setrakian puts it in a piece at the Huffington Post:

“Consider Syria Deeply the open source R&D. What we learn and hone we hope to apply to a range of global issues: think Iran Deeply, Pakistan Deeply, Drug War Deeply, Debt Crisis Deeply. If we do that, we can get a whole lot smarter, together. Then the good we all have in us will have better information to go on, shrinking wicked problems down to size.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Yan-Arief Purwanto

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The Renesys blog entry is short, and promises updates. From the Renesys blog:

Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria’s international Internet connectivity shut down. In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria’s IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet.

Cutting off entire countries form the global Internet has become a strategy employed by some governments in times of civil unrest — and underscores many of the weak points of the Internet itself. Both Libya, Iran and Egypt pulled much of their connections to the web world offline in the last two years. We explained how Egypt took the country offline in this post:

The OpenNet Initiative has outlined two methods by which most nations could enact such shutdowns. Essentially, officials can either close down the routers which direct traffic over the border — hermetically sealing the country from outsiders — or go further down the chain and switch off routers at individual ISPs to prevent access for most users inside.

At the time Egypt took the second route to take the country offline, a process made easier by the fact that their were few ISPs to contact. It’s unclear how Syria disconnected its citizens. Some news reports say insurgents are communicating still via satellite phones, but the lost of IP addresses means no IP services can find their way to end users within the country. When a packet destined for a Syrian IP address is sent, it simply can’t find out where it’s supposed to go.

Update: Here’s what that drop off in traffic looks like, courtesy of Akamai.

This is one reason that technologies such as OpenBTS, Commotion, the Serval Project and other technologies to build out open source communications networks are important. While those may not ensure that people in Syria can talk to the outside world unless they have a satellite backhaul, they could still communicate with one another independently of the local ISPs.

Photo courtesy of <a href=”2lights.net / Shutterstock.com“>Shutterstock user 2lights.net.

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As we have described a number of times at GigaOM, journalism has become something virtually anyone can practice now, thanks to social tools and digital media. This democratization of distribution has had a profound effect on the coverage of uprisings in Egypt and Libya and more recently in Syria. Thanks to YouTube, Twitter and other networks, more information is available about what is happening in those countries. But is it reliable? According to some reports, the news coming from Syria has been altered by activists who are trying to make a specific point. Does that mean citizen journalism is flawed? Not really. It just means that we need better tools to make sense of the flood of news that is all around us.

As Britain’s Channel 4 described in a recent piece about the rise of citizen journalism in Syria, dozens of video bloggers have emerged who are literally risking their lives to bring video evidence of the violence there to the world: In at least one case, a video blogger died while live streaming a demonstration. While the death of veteran Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin in February got a lot of attention, so far not much has been paid to the “citizen journalists” who are putting themselves in similar situations. In a piece on Colvin’s death, New York Times media writer David Carr said that foreign reporting requires more than just “clicking on a YouTube video.”

Citizen journalism often comes with a viewpoint

Carr is right, at least in the sense that what is missing when we try to understand a place like Syria or Egypt through YouTube videos or Twitter is context. How do we know the videos or reports we are getting are true? Channel 4 said on Tuesday that it has discovered at least one video of the city of Homs was altered by the person who uploaded it, with a cloud of smoke added to the picture.

The video journalist who took the video admitted that he altered it and said he did so to raise awareness of the violence taking place in the city so the world would respond. This sounds a lot like the arguments that some observers made in defense of Mike Daisey, whose report on Public Radio International about visiting Apple factories in China turned out to be partially fiction. Some — including Daisey — said his embellishments were justified because they exposed a larger truth about Apple and its conduct in China, while others said any altering of facts made the entire story suspect.

One of the issues in a place like Syria or Egypt is that much of the reporting we get from nonmainstream sources almost inevitably comes from people who are either involved with a rebel group or are friendly toward it (although it should be noted this is the case with much traditional foreign reporting as well). This phenomenon was also seen during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, when video reporters like Tim Pool emerged to tell the story of the protests and developed a large following very quickly, despite making it clear that they didn’t see themselves as journalists.

Traditional and citizen journalism are not adversaries

One response to this phenomenon is to lament the loss of traditional foreign reporting, as Carr seemed to be doing in his tribute to Colvin, and criticize the emptiness or unreliability of YouTube videos and citizen journalism. But another response is to see the value of the phenomenon — as Nick Kristof of the NYT seemed to in comments he made about citizen journalism and the Occupy movement — and try to apply journalistic principles to this maelstrom of content coming from a thousand different sources, some reliable and some not. This is what the BBC does with its user-generated-content desk, which sits in the newsroom and filters and verifies reports coming from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

This is also what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has been doing with his Twitter account ever since the Arab Spring revolutions broke out in Tunisia and Egypt. As he described in a recent interview with Current.org, Carvin sees Twitter as the place where he does the majority of his journalism — and where his followers act simultaneously as sources, fact-checkers, editors and distributors:

It’s not that I’m just using Twitter and integrating other forms of journalism — it’s that I see Twitter as the newsroom where I spend my time.

Whenever I write about what Carvin is doing, someone inevitably makes the argument that what he is doing isn’t “real” journalism, which presumably consists of flying to these locations and reporting on camera the way we are used to. The argument seems to be that since Carvin is sitting at his desk monitoring Twitter (and using the telephone), that he isn’t really doing journalism. As I have argued before, this is absurd. Carvin is applying exactly the same journalistic principles that traditional reporters always have, including the duty to verify facts. He is simply applying them in real time and in full public view, which is arguably better than the traditional alternative.

Citizen journalism and the rise of social media don’t mean that we don’t need traditional foreign correspondents anymore, or traditional reporting. If anything, we need those kinds of skills even more than we ever have. But the globe-trotting war correspondent is no longer the only game in town when taxi drivers can report bombings just as easily as a CNN crew, and training the new breed of curator journalists may involve Twitter and YouTube lessons instead of flak jackets. In the end, as Jay Rosen has said many times, journalism gets better when there are more people doing it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Petteri Sulonen and Yan Arief Purwanto

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Alsayeed and some of his friends had located their camera on a rooftop in the Homs neighborhood of Babaamr, according to Bambuser. Very graphic footage of his body has since shown up on YouTube, and Bambuser relayed one of his latest messages on its blog. It reads, in part:

“Babaamr is facing a genocide right now. I will never forgive you for your silence. You all have just give us your words but we need actions.”

Live streaming was an essential tool in the Arab spring, but has also been under constant attack by the embattled regimes. Last week, Bambuser reported that its site had been blocked by Syria. Ustream and Livestream told us that they hadn’t seen any interference from the Syrian regime so far.

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Citizens in Homs have been reporting on the attacks through live streaming for days. Their footage has been picked up by numerous major media organizations, including the BBC and CNN, which are barred from reporting in the country. A Bambuser spokesperson estimated that about 90 percent of the footage coming out of Syria on recent days was originally broadcasted via Bambuser.

This isn’t the first time of live streaming and video hosting sites being blocked during the Arab Spring. Egypt and Lybia cracked down on Internet use during the uprisings in both countries, and Lybians resorted to sneakernet methods to smuggle footage out of their countries, uploading clips from Internet cafes in Egypt to circumvent their government’s censorship.

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It took months for the world to pick up on the plight of Amina Arraf, a lesbian blogger from Damascus who challenged the authorities — and her readers — to understand the troubles of Syria’s population. Her end, however, was decidedly swift.

After a series questions and investigations into her identity, it rapidly emerged that the whole thing was a hoax. In a posting published a short while ago, “Amina” was revealed to be a fictional character — the work of a Scottish educator an American grad student based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Tom MacMaster, who claimed that he had created the character in order to publicize the situation in Syria:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

The truth is, however, that his confession came only after the net had already closed in, thanks to a series of links back to MacMaster and his wife, American campaigner Britta Froelicher. There had already been a number of skeptics by the time the first shoe really dropped, when the blog carried news of Arraf’s disappearance and arrest. The sudden flurry of media activity that followed led to the revelation that the photo of “Amina” was actually Jelena Lecic, a Croatian woman living in London. Alarm bells started ringing, though obviously there were plenty of reasons why Arraf might use a fake photograph (as well as, possibly, an obscured identity, though she claimed at times it was her real name).

But after a collective effort from a number of individuals, notably NPR’s Andy Carvin, San Francisco developer Liz Henry and Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, the truth came out. It also emerged that MacMaster and his wife were a pair of seasoned pro-Palestinian campaigners based largely in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The reaction so far has been a mixture of relief — that Amina was not really imprisoned after all — and anger; anger not only at being duped, but also because the hoax potentially endangers the lives and stories of real Syrians trying to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Jillian York, for example, who has written eloquently about her feelings on the situation, says she is ”furious”.

So what does this hoax tell us? What will it mean?

There will likely be some social and political repercussions. Actual members of Syria’s gay communities were concerned that they would be targeted by the authorities since the blog (and therefore their repressive tactics) had become so widely discussed. That doesn’t sit well with MacMaster’s statement that he does not believe he’s harmed anyone. At the same time, the political stance of both MacMaster and Froelicher will inevitably allow some political sites to paint the whole enterprise (and by association, concern for Syrians) as some anti-Israeli conspiracy.

And then, of course, there will be the inevitable hand-wringing. How did readers get fooled so easily? Why did nobody find this out before? How did news organizations get sucked in?

It’s likely that some will blame this on the mainstream media’s failure to out Arraf. Numerous outlets covered her story: CNN quoted her in an article and the Guardian also ran an interview with her. How could they not know? Was there a failure of process?

There have been plenty of high-profile failures in the news business over the years, from the Hitler Diaries to the Balloon Boy hoax. News organizations are looking for credible, compelling stories and Arraf’s was too interesting to ignore. The blog had been online for some years, telling a consistent story. Of course, confirming her identity was hard, but she conducted long conversations with people over IM and Skype and had credible reasons for staying a little under the radar (NPR’s Carvin asked the Guardian about their interview and it turned out it did not happen in person). This was a failure, obviously, since the hoax wasn’t spotted — but right now, it’s not clear how serious that failure was.

At the same time, some will likely suggest that it’s the online world’s fault for allowing her story to spread so far and so fast. Without the instant pass-it-along-and-don’t-check-the-facts nature of a service like Twitter, without the anyone-can-do-it nature of blogging, would we even be in this situation? Despite the fact that Twitter, blogging and the rest helped solve this puzzle, there’s not much to crow about. The online world has more than its share of hoaxes, and the fake blogger routine has been around for a long time.

I remember writing a story more than 10 years ago about a blogger called Kaycee Nicole, who purported to be an American teenager documenting her fight against leukaemia. She gained a significant following in the run-up to her death in 2001 — at which point, after some skeptics decided to investigate, it turned out to be a hoax. The culprit, a Debbie Swenson, had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the fantasy going: online chats, photos, phone calls and so on. She received lots of good will and plenty of gifts from well-wishers — so much so, that the FBI ended up looking into the case over fraud allegations. Online hoaxes of this sort have been going on for years and will continue as long as people are trying to deceive the audience.

The truth is, whether it’s a fictional character like Amina Arraf or faked material like Hitler’s diaries or simply a sad fantasy like Kaycee Nicole, moments like this will always exist as long as there are rules for somebody to work around.

Attention is an incredible, addictive thing, and verification can sometimes be difficult. As long as some people want to deliberately deceive you, for whatever reason, and there are people who want to believe, then hoaxes will be hard to eradicate.

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Syria has seen pro-democracy protests for weeks now, and the ruling regime has increasingly turned violent following a nationwide day of protests on Friday, April 22. Just this week, tanks have entered the city of Deraa, where the uprising began more than a month ago.

As happened in Libya and Egypt, the increase in violence was met with a local media blackout. The regime has expelled a number of foreign correspondents, making it harder for traditional news organizations to operate from within the country.

But just as in those earlier protests, there has also been a steady stream of YouTube videos coming out of Syria documenting the violence. A YouTube spokesperson told us late Wednesday that the site has seen more than 9,400 videos tagged “Syria” or Syria in Arabic in the last seven days. Some of the videos of recent weeks purportedly show scenes of very graphic violence as security forces open fire on protesters, while others reportedly depict troop movements towards Deraa. Last week, YouTube users could witness what was described by uploaders as mass demonstrations against the Syrian regime:

YouTube has been collaborating with the citizen media curator Storyful to showcase some of these videos as part of its Citizentube project. Storyful Editorial Director David Clinch recently told us his company is vetting all its sources through traditional journalistic research and it has “a very high degree of confidence” in the videos curated by his company.

Syria had censored the Internet for years and only recently unblocked access to Facebook and YouTube. The measure was meant to appease citizens and show the regime was willing to reform. Data from Google shows YouTube traffic went sharply up after the site got unblocked.

It looks like YouTube is still largely accessible from within Syria, but there have been reports of phone and Internet access going down in select cities. Citizens of crisis-stricken countries from within the region have, in the past, often resorted to sneakernet access to get the word out about protests and violence against protesters, with Libyans smuggling flash memory drives with mobile phone footage out of the country after authorities shut down Internet access.

However, Global Voices activist Leila Nachawati reminded us this week that the videos coming out of Syria these days, while undoubtedly helping to break down the media blackout, don’t necessarily change the situation on the ground:

“We should keep in mind that although citizens may be winning the communication battle, the weapons are still in the hands of those who have the power over people´s lives.”

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