A collaborative effort between a social media news aggregator and a tech incubator resulted in a crowdsourcing endeavor to aid journalists with war reporting. Storyful and Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas) partnered to launch Montage -- a platform that "facilitates the process of building projects using the eyewitness accounts from across the globe, helping to tap into the power of activist footage."
Montage improves war reporting with a video library where reporters and human rights organizations can, in real time, annotate, archive and geo-tag videos. This encourages increased collaboration between team members and easily includes translators and experts. Videos are represented as pins on a map, which helps war correspondents to visualize issues and even realize patterns occurring. Therefore, users can more readily analyze, curate, find and share relevant YouTube videos.
Collaborative Journalism Platforms
Montage Crowdsources War Reporting with Activist Footage
Trend Themes
1. Crowdsourced Journalism - Platforms that enable crowdsourcing journalism and other mediums of content can challenge traditional media channels.
2. Collaborative Video Curation - Video curation tools that permit crowdsourced annotations, archiving and geo-tagging like Montage can foster an inclusive and shared experience.
3. Activist Footage Integration - Platforms that integrate activist footage in war reporting like Montage can provide human rights organizations with new ways of raising awareness and accountability.
Industry Implications
1. Journalism - Crowdsourcing tools and platforms that transform traditional journalism models can engender deeper civic engagement and challenge the democratic function of journalism.
2. Human Rights - Access to visual evidence can become more democratic with the integration of emerging technologies that enable the creation of bottom-up archives such as Montage.
3. Tech Incubation - Tech incubators can foster innovation by fostering collaboration between technology and media and incentivizing startups to find innovative solutions to traditional problems.