WEBVTT

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Well, hello everybody!

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I'm here to talk to you about
a new way of doing journalism.

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Some people call this citizen journalism,

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other people call it
collaborative journalism,

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but really it kind of means this:
for the journalists, people like me,

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it means accepting
that you can't know everything

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and allowing other people,
through technology,

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to be your eyes and your ears.

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And for people like you,
for other members of the public,

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it can mean not just being
the passive consumers of news,

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but also co-producing news.

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And I believe this can be
a really empowering process.

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It can enable ordinary people
to hold powerful organizations to account.

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So I am going to explain this
to you today with two cases,

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two stories that I've investigated.

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And they both involve
controversial deaths.

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And in both cases, the authorities
put out an official version of events,

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which was somewhat misleading.

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We were able to tell an alternative truth
utilizing new technology,

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utilizing social media,
particularly Twitter.

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Essentially, what I'm talking about here
is, as I said, citizen journalism.

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So to take the first case,

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this is Ian Tomlinson,
man in the foreground.

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He was a newspaper vendor from London,
and on the 1st of April 2009,

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he died at the G20 protests in London.

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He wasn't a protester, he'd been trying
to find his way home from work

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through the demonstrations,
but he didn't get home.

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He had an encounter
with a man behind him, and as you can see,

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the man behind him has covered his face
with a balaclava.

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And, in fact,
he wasn't showing his badge numbers.

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But I can tell you now,
he was PC Simon Harwood,

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a police officer
with London's Metropolitan Police Force.

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In fact, he belonged
to the elite territorial support group.

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Now, moments after this image was shot,
Harwood struck Tomlinson with a baton,

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and he pushed him to ground,
and Tomlinson died moments later.

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But that wasn't the story
the police wanted us to tell.

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Initially, through official statements
and off-the-record briefings,

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they said that Ian Tomlinson
had died of natural causes.

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They said that there had been
no contact with the police,

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that there were no marks on his body.

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In fact, they said that when police
tried to resuscitate him,

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the police medics were impeded
from doing so

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because protesters were throwing missiles,
believed to be bottles, at police.

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And the result of that
were stories like this.

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I show you this slide
because this was the newspaper

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that Ian Tomlinson had been selling
for 20 years of his life.

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And if any news organization
had an obligation

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to properly forensically analyze
what had been going on,

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it was the Evening Standard newspaper,
but they, like everyone else,

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including my news organization,

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were misled by the official version
of events put out by police.

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But you can see here the bottles

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that were supposedly being thrown
at the police

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were turned into bricks
by the time they reached

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this edition of the newspaper.

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We were suspicious and we wanted to see
if there was more to the story.

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We needed to find those protesters
you see in the image,

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but they had vanished
by the time we started investigating.

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So how do you find the witnesses?

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And this is, for me,
where it got really interesting.

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We turned to the internet.

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This is Twitter,
we've heard a lot about it today.

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Essentially, for me,
when I began investigating this case,

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I was completely new to this,
I'd signed up two days earlier.

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And I discovered
that Twitter was a micro-blogging site.

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It enabled me to send out
short, 140-character messages.

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Also, an amazing search facility.

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But it was a social arena
in which other people

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were gathering with a common motive.

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And in this case,
independently of journalists,

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people themselves were interrogating
exactly what had happened to Ian Tomlinson

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in his last 30 minutes of life.

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Individuals like these two guys.

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So they went to Ian Tomlinson's aid
after he collapsed.

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They phoned the ambulance.

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They didn't see any bottles,
they didn't see any bricks.

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They were concerned that
the stories weren't quite as accurate

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as police were claiming them to be.

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And again, through social media,
we started encountering

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individuals with material like this:
photographs, evidence.

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Now this does not show the attack
on Ian Tomlinson,

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but he appears to be in some distress.

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Was he drunk?
Did he fall over?

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Did this have anything to do
with the police officers next to him?

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Here he appears to be talking to them.

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For us, this was enough
to investigate further, to dig deeper.

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The result was putting out
stories ourselves.

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Now, one of the most amazing things
about the internet is the information

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that people put out is freely available
to anyone, as we all know.

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That doesn't just go
for citizen journalists,

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or for people putting out
messages on Facebook or Twitter.

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That goes for journalists themselves,
people like me.

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As long as your news is the right side
of a pay wall, i.e., it's free,

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anybody can access it.

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And stories like these,
which were questioning

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the official version of events,
which were skeptical in tone,

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allowed people to realize
that we had questions ourselves.

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They were online magnets.

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Individuals with material
that could help us

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were drawn toward us
by some kind of gravitational force.

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And after six days, we had managed
to track down around 20 witnesses.

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And we've plotted them here on the map.

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This is the scene
of Ian Tomlinson's death,

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the Bank of England in London.

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And each of these witnesses
that we plotted on the map,

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you could click on these
small bullet points,

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and you could hear what they had to say,
see their photographic image,

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and at times,
see their videographic images as well.

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But still, at this stage,
with witnesses telling us

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that they'd seen police
attack Ian Tomlinson before his death,

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still, police refused to accept that.

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There was no official investigation
into his death.

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And then something changed.

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I got an email from
an investment fund manager in New York.

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On the day of Ian Tomlinson's death,
he'd been in London on business,

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and he'd taken out his digital camera,
and he'd recorded this.

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(Video) This is the crowd
at G20 protest

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on April the 1st around 7:20PM.

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They were on Cornhill,
near the Bank of England.

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This footage will form the basis
of a police investigation

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into the death of this man.

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Ian Tomlinson was walking
through this area,

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attempting to get home from work.

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(People yelling)

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We've slowed down the footage
to show how it poses serious questions

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about police conduct.

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Ian Tomlinson had his back
to riot officers and dog handlers

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and was walking away from them,
he had his hands in his pockets.

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Here the riot officer appears to strike
Tomlinson's leg area with a baton.

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He then lunges Tomlinson from behind.

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Tomlinson is propelled forward
and hits the floor.

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(People yelling)

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Paul Lewis: Okay, so, shocking stuff,
that video wasn't playing too well,

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but when I remember
when I first watched the video for myself

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I'd been in touch with
this investment fund manager in New York,

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you know, I'd become obsessed
with this story.

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I spoke to so many people who'd said
they'd seen this happen,

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and the guy on the other end of the phone
was saying, "Look the video shows it."

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I didn't want to believe him
until I actually saw it for myself.

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It was 2AM, I was there with an IT guy,

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the video wasn't working,
and then finally,

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it landed and I clicked on it.

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And I just realized this is
really something quite significant.

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And within 15 hours,
we put it on our website.

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The first thing police did
was they came into our office,

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senior officers came to our office,
and asked us to take the video down.

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We said no.

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It would have been too late anyway

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because it had traveled around the world.

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And the officer in that film,
in two days' time,

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will appear before
an inquest jury in London,

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and they have the power to decide
that Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed.

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So that's the first case,
I said two cases today.

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The second case is this man.

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Now, like Ian Tomlinson, he was a father.

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He lived in London,
but he was a political refugee from Angola

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and six months ago, the British government
decided they wanted

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to return him to Angola;
he was a failed asylum seeker.

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So they booked him a seat on an airline,
okay, a flight from Heathrow.

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Now, the official version of events,
official explanation,

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of Jimmy Mubenga's death
was simply that he'd taken ill.

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He'd become unwell on the flight,
the plane had returned to Heathrow,

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and then he was transferred to a hospital
and pronounced dead.

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Now, what actually happened
to Jimmy Mubenga,

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the story that we were able to tell,
my colleague Mathew Taylor and I,

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was that three security guards
began trying to restrain him in his seat.

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When he was resisting his deportation,
they were restraining him in his seat.

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They placed him in a dangerous hold.

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It keeps detainees quiet
and he was making a lot of noise.

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But it can also lead
to positional asphyxia,

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a form of suffocation.

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You have to imagine here that
there were other passengers on the plane,

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who could hear him saying
"I can't breathe, I can't breathe.

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They're killing me."

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And then he stopped breathing.

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So how did we find these passengers?

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For Ian Tomlinson's case,
the witnesses were still in London,

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but these passengers,
many of them had returned to Angola.

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How were we going to find them?

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Again, we turned to the internet,
and we wrote -

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as I said before,
stories, they're online magnets.

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The tone of some these stories,

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journalism professors might frown upon
because they were skeptical,

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they were asking questions,
perhaps speculative,

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maybe things that journalists
shouldn't do, but we needed to do it,

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and we needed to use Twitter also.

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Here I'm saying an Angolan man
dies on a flight.

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This story could be big,
a level of speculation.

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This next tweet says, "Please RT."

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That means please retweet,
please pass down the chain.

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And one of the fascinating things
about Twitter

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is that the pattern of flow of information

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is unlike anything we've ever seen before.

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We don't understand it,
but once you let go

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of a piece of information,
it travels like wind.

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You can't determine
where it ends up, but strangely,

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tweets have an uncanny ability
to reach their intended destination.

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And in this case, it was this man.

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He says, "I was also there on the BA77" -
that's the flight number -

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"And the man was begging for help,

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and I now feel so guilty
that I did nothing."

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Now this was Michael.

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He was on an Angolan oil field
when he sent me this tweet.

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I was in my office in London.

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He had concerns
about what happened on the flight.

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He'd gone onto his laptop,
he typed in the flight number.

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He'd encountered that tweet,
he'd encountered our stories.

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He realized we had an intention
to tell a different version of events.

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We were skeptical and he contacted me.

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And this is what Michael said.

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(Audio) Michael: "I'm pretty sure
it'll turn out to be asphyxiation.

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The last thing we heard the man say
was he couldn't breathe.

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And he got three security guards
and each one of them

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looked like 100-kilo plus,
bearing down on him,

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holding him down,
from what I could see, below the seats.

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What I saw was the three men trying
to pull him down below the seats.

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And all I could see was his head
sticking up above the seats

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and he was hollering out,
you know, "Help me."

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He just kept saying, "Help me, help me,"
and then he disappeared below the seats.

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And you could see the three security
guards sitting on top of him from there.

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For the rest of my life, I'm always
going to have that in the back of my mind.

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Could I have done something?

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That's going to bother me
every time I lay down to go to sleep now.

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I didn't get involved because I was scared

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I might get kicked off the flight
and lose my job.

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If it takes three men
to hold a man down,

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to put him on a flight,

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when the public is armed,
that's acceptable, okay.

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If the man died,
okay, that right there is excessive."

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PL: So that was his interpretation
of what had happened on the flight.

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And Michael was actually
one of five witnesses

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that we eventually managed to track down,
most of them, as I said,

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through the internet,
through social media.

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We could actually place them
on the plane,

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so you could see
exactly where they were sat.

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And I should say at this stage,
that one really important dimension

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to all of this,
for journalists to utilize social media,

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and who utilize this as in journalism,
is making sure we get our facts correct.

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Verification is absolutely essential.

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So in the case
of the Ian Tomlinson witnesses,

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I got them to return to the scene
of the death

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and physically walk me through,
and tell me exactly what they had seen.

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That was absolutely essential.

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In the case of Mubenga,
we couldn't do that,

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but they could send us
their boarding passes.

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We could interrogate what they were saying

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and ensure it was consistent with what
our other passengers were saying too.

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The danger in all of this for journalists,
for all of us,

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is that we're victims of hoaxes,
or that there's deliberate misinformation

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fed into the public domain,
so we have to be careful.

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But nobody can deny the power
of citizen journalism.

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When a plane crashes into the Hudson
two years ago,

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and the world finds out about this
because a man is on a nearby ferry,

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he takes out his iPhone,
and he photographs the image of the plane

00:14:05.340 --> 00:14:06.900
and sends it around the world.

00:14:06.900 --> 00:14:09.090
That's how most people
found out initially,

00:14:09.090 --> 00:14:13.564
in the early minutes and hours,
about the plane in Hudson River.

00:14:13.564 --> 00:14:16.860
And think of the two biggest news stories
of the year, okay?

00:14:16.860 --> 00:14:20.210
We had the Japanese earthquake
and the tsunami.

00:14:20.210 --> 00:14:23.720
Cast your mind's eye
back to the images that you saw

00:14:23.720 --> 00:14:25.635
on your television screens.

00:14:25.635 --> 00:14:29.290
They were boats left five miles inland.

00:14:29.290 --> 00:14:33.462
They were houses being moved along
as if in the sea.

00:14:34.350 --> 00:14:38.820
Water lifting up inside people's
living rooms, supermarkets shaking.

00:14:38.820 --> 00:14:41.090
These were images
shot by citizen journalists,

00:14:41.090 --> 00:14:42.970
and instantly shared on the internet.

00:14:42.970 --> 00:14:47.255
And the other big story of the year,
the political crisis,

00:14:47.255 --> 00:14:50.524
the political earthquake
in the Middle East.

00:14:50.524 --> 00:14:55.482
And it doesn't matter if it was
Egypt, or Libya, or Syria, or Yemen.

00:14:55.482 --> 00:14:58.570
Individuals have managed to overcome

00:14:58.570 --> 00:15:04.010
the repressive restrictions in those
regimes by recording their environment

00:15:04.010 --> 00:15:06.150
and telling their own stories
on the internet.

00:15:06.150 --> 00:15:08.598
Again, always very difficult to verify,

00:15:08.598 --> 00:15:12.709
but potentially,
a huge layer of accountability.

00:15:12.709 --> 00:15:15.290
This image - and I could have
shown you any, actually.

00:15:15.290 --> 00:15:16.500
YouTube is full of them.

00:15:16.500 --> 00:15:21.187
This image is of an apparently
unarmed protester in Bahrain.

00:15:21.187 --> 00:15:24.125
And he's being shot by security forces.

00:15:24.125 --> 00:15:28.530
It doesn't matter
if the individual being mistreated,

00:15:28.530 --> 00:15:32.643
possibly even killed,
is in Bahrain or in London.

00:15:32.643 --> 00:15:36.790
But citizen journalism and this technology
has inserted a new layer

00:15:36.790 --> 00:15:41.185
of accountability into our world,
and I think that's a good thing.

00:15:41.185 --> 00:15:45.210
To conclude the theme of the conference,
why not?

00:15:45.210 --> 00:15:47.660
I think for journalists,
it's quite simple really.

00:15:47.660 --> 00:15:52.210
I mean why not utilize this technology,
which massively broadens

00:15:52.210 --> 00:15:55.310
the boundaries of what's possible,
accept that many of the things

00:15:55.310 --> 00:15:59.946
that happen in our world now go recorded,
and we can obtain that information

00:15:59.946 --> 00:16:01.698
through social media.

00:16:01.698 --> 00:16:03.170
That's new for journalists

00:16:03.170 --> 00:16:06.870
The stories I showed you, I don't think
we would have been able to investigate

00:16:06.870 --> 00:16:09.920
10 years ago,
possibly even five years ago.

00:16:09.920 --> 00:16:12.950
I think there's a very good argument
to say that the two deaths,

00:16:12.950 --> 00:16:15.810
the death of Ian Tomlinson,
and the death of Jimmy Mubenga,

00:16:15.810 --> 00:16:19.370
we still today wouldn't know
exactly what happened in those cases.

00:16:19.370 --> 00:16:21.780
And why not, for people like yourselves?

00:16:21.780 --> 00:16:24.399
Well, I think that's very simple too.

00:16:24.399 --> 00:16:28.060
If you encounter something
that you believe is problematic,

00:16:28.060 --> 00:16:32.280
that disturbs you, that concerns you,
an injustice of some kind,

00:16:32.280 --> 00:16:35.190
something that just
doesn't feel quite right,

00:16:35.190 --> 00:16:39.862
then why not witness it,
record it, and share it?

00:16:40.833 --> 00:16:46.341
That process of witnessing,
recording, and sharing is journalism.

00:16:46.678 --> 00:16:48.970
And we can all do it, so thank you.

00:16:48.970 --> 00:16:50.366
(Applause)