SUMMIT

Palestinian Mediagogy
In the past few years Palesnian acvists and a growing mass of supporters all over the
world have created thousands of alternave news websites, blogs, podcasts, mailing lists,
and solidarity groups in web-communies, to educate internaonal publics about the
realies of the plight of the Palesnian people and their just struggle to end Apartheid in
Palesne. The totality of these efforts aim to break the mal-reporng trends of the main
news agencies and to end their monopoly on seng the news agenda for Palesne and
the Middle East region as a whole.
Within Palesne the process of news producon is changing rapidly. Most local radios and
TVs now have news websites and many are also broadcasng live on the internet. Several
local TV staons have also created channels on YouTube and are making their news
reports available for thousands of viewers around the world. Outside Palesne, Palesnian
expatriates created several successful alternave news websites, among them the
famous ElectronicInfada.net that now has bred other sites like ElectronicIraq.net and
ElectronicLebanon.net.
During Israeli military invasions of Palesnian cies, Palesnian residents become reporters
within their localies calling local radio and TV staons with eyewitness accounts.
Some take digital photos or videos and upload them onto YouTube channels or send them
to main Palesnian news sites on the web like:
hp://www.imemc.org - Internaonal Middle East Media Center (en)
hp://www.pnn.ps - The Palesne News Network (en/ar/he/fr)
hp://english.wafa.ps - WAFA - Palesne News Agency (en/ar/he/fr)
hp://www.maannews.net - Ma'an News (en/ar/he)
As an alternave Palesnian news agency Ma'an News 9 was established in 2004 as an
on-line News agency that publishes up-to-the-minute news in Arabic, English, and Hebrew
and is composed of a network of nine independent TV staons and producon studios
located in each major city of the West Bank and Gaza. Ma’an News is a good example of a
hybrid between regular and cizens/parcipatory journalism and it is certainly a reflecon
of how newsrooms are changing in the new millennium.
The power of participatory/citizens journalism
(personal examples)
** My first exposure to the power of cizens’ journalism occurred in October 1990. I
helped my university friend Mathew Bergman from the USA to go to Palesne to record
video interviews with Palesnians from different walks of life in order to document how
Palesnian society was coping under the Israeli military occupaon during the first
Palesnian Uprising. Mathew was not a journalist. He had a degree in anthropology and
he was doing this documentary project to educate his fellow Americans about the realies
of the situaon in the OPT as a form of solidarity with the Palesnian people. He
interviewed Palesnian philanthropists, social acvists, educators, visual arsts and
musicians. But while in Jerusalem, Mathew learned from a circulated leaflet that the
9
Ma'an means 'together' in Arabic.
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