Citizen journalism | Paul Lewis | TEDxThessaloniki

Journalist Paul Lewis talks about new media, citizen journalism. and how he has used social media to investigate two murders. He also talks about the new level of transparency and accountability new media offer in public life.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Well, hello everybody!

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

Some people call this citizen journalism,

other people call it
collaborative journalism,

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

it means accepting
that you can't know everything

and allowing other people,
through technology,

to be your eyes and your ears.

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

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

but also co-producing news.

And I believe this can be
a really empowering process.

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

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

two stories that I've investigated.

And they both involve
controversial deaths.

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

which was somewhat misleading.

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

utilizing social media,
particularly Twitter.

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

So to take the first case,

this is Ian Tomlinson,
man in the foreground.

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

he died at the G20 protests in London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

a police officer
with London's Metropolitan Police Force.

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

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

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

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

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

they said that Ian Tomlinson
had died of natural causes.

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

that there were no marks on his body.

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

the police medics were impeded
from doing so

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

And the result of that
were stories like this.

I show you this slide
because this was the newspaper

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

And if any news organization
had an obligation

to properly forensically analyze
what had been going on,

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

including my news organization,

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

But you can see here the bottles

that were supposedly being thrown
at the police

were turned into bricks
by the time they reached

this edition of the newspaper.

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

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

but they had vanished
by the time we started investigating.

So how do you find the witnesses?

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

We turned to the internet.

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

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

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

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

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

Also, an amazing search facility.

But it was a social arena
in which other people

were gathering with a common motive.

And in this case,
independently of journalists,

people themselves were interrogating
exactly what had happened to Ian Tomlinson

in his last 30 minutes of life.

Individuals like these two guys.

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

They phoned the ambulance.

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

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

as police were claiming them to be.

And again, through social media,
we started encountering

individuals with material like this:
photographs, evidence.

Now this does not show the attack
on Ian Tomlinson,

but he appears to be in some distress.

Was he drunk?
Did he fall over?

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

Here he appears to be talking to them.

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

The result was putting out
stories ourselves.

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

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

That doesn't just go
for citizen journalists,

or for people putting out
messages on Facebook or Twitter.

That goes for journalists themselves,
people like me.

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

anybody can access it.

And stories like these,
which were questioning

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

allowed people to realize
that we had questions ourselves.

They were online magnets.

Individuals with material
that could help us

were drawn toward us
by some kind of gravitational force.

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

And we've plotted them here on the map.

This is the scene
of Ian Tomlinson's death,

the Bank of England in London.

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

you could click on these
small bullet points,

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

and at times,
see their videographic images as well.

But still, at this stage,
with witnesses telling us

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

still, police refused to accept that.

There was no official investigation
into his death.

And then something changed.

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

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

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

(Video) This is the crowd
at G20 protest

on April the 1st around 7:20PM.

They were on Cornhill,
near the Bank of England.

This footage will form the basis
of a police investigation

into the death of this man.

Ian Tomlinson was walking
through this area,

attempting to get home from work.

(People yelling)

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

about police conduct.

Ian Tomlinson had his back
to riot officers and dog handlers

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

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

He then lunges Tomlinson from behind.

Tomlinson is propelled forward
and hits the floor.

(People yelling)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the video wasn't working,
and then finally,

it landed and I clicked on it.

And I just realized this is
really something quite significant.

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

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

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

We said no.

It would have been too late anyway

because it had traveled around the world.

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

will appear before
an inquest jury in London,

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

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

The second case is this man.

Now, like Ian Tomlinson, he was a father.

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

and six months ago, the British government
decided they wanted

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

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

Now, the official version of events,
official explanation,

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

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

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

Now, what actually happened
to Jimmy Mubenga,

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

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

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

They placed him in a dangerous hold.

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

But it can also lead
to positional asphyxia,

a form of suffocation.

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

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

They're killing me."

And then he stopped breathing.

So how did we find these passengers?

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

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

How were we going to find them?

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

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

The tone of some these stories,

journalism professors might frown upon
because they were skeptical,

they were asking questions,
perhaps speculative,

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

and we needed to use Twitter also.

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

This story could be big,
a level of speculation.

This next tweet says, "Please RT."

That means please retweet,
please pass down the chain.

And one of the fascinating things
about Twitter

is that the pattern of flow of information

is unlike anything we've ever seen before.

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

of a piece of information,
it travels like wind.

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

tweets have an uncanny ability
to reach their intended destination.

And in this case, it was this man.

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

"And the man was begging for help,

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

Now this was Michael.

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

I was in my office in London.

He had concerns
about what happened on the flight.

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

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

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

We were skeptical and he contacted me.

And this is what Michael said.

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

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

And he got three security guards
and each one of them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could I have done something?

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

I didn't get involved because I was scared

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

If it takes three men
to hold a man down,

to put him on a flight,

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

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

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

And Michael was actually
one of five witnesses

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

through the internet,
through social media.

We could actually place them
on the plane,

so you could see
exactly where they were sat.

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

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

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

Verification is absolutely essential.

So in the case
of the Ian Tomlinson witnesses,

I got them to return to the scene
of the death

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

That was absolutely essential.

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

but they could send us
their boarding passes.

We could interrogate what they were saying

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

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

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

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

But nobody can deny the power
of citizen journalism.

When a plane crashes into the Hudson
two years ago,

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

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

and sends it around the world.

That's how most people
found out initially,

in the early minutes and hours,
about the plane in Hudson River.

And think of the two biggest news stories
of the year, okay?

We had the Japanese earthquake
and the tsunami.

Cast your mind's eye
back to the images that you saw

on your television screens.

They were boats left five miles inland.

They were houses being moved along
as if in the sea.

Water lifting up inside people's
living rooms, supermarkets shaking.

These were images
shot by citizen journalists,

and instantly shared on the internet.

And the other big story of the year,
the political crisis,

the political earthquake
in the Middle East.

And it doesn't matter if it was
Egypt, or Libya, or Syria, or Yemen.

Individuals have managed to overcome

the repressive restrictions in those
regimes by recording their environment

and telling their own stories
on the internet.

Again, always very difficult to verify,

but potentially,
a huge layer of accountability.

This image - and I could have
shown you any, actually.

YouTube is full of them.

This image is of an apparently
unarmed protester in Bahrain.

And he's being shot by security forces.

It doesn't matter
if the individual being mistreated,

possibly even killed,
is in Bahrain or in London.

But citizen journalism and this technology
has inserted a new layer

of accountability into our world,
and I think that's a good thing.

To conclude the theme of the conference,
why not?

I think for journalists,
it's quite simple really.

I mean why not utilize this technology,
which massively broadens

the boundaries of what's possible,
accept that many of the things

that happen in our world now go recorded,
and we can obtain that information

through social media.

That's new for journalists

The stories I showed you, I don't think
we would have been able to investigate

10 years ago,
possibly even five years ago.

I think there's a very good argument
to say that the two deaths,

the death of Ian Tomlinson,
and the death of Jimmy Mubenga,

we still today wouldn't know
exactly what happened in those cases.

And why not, for people like yourselves?

Well, I think that's very simple too.

If you encounter something
that you believe is problematic,

that disturbs you, that concerns you,
an injustice of some kind,

something that just
doesn't feel quite right,

then why not witness it,
record it, and share it?

That process of witnessing,
recording, and sharing is journalism.

And we can all do it, so thank you.

(Applause)