Compared to Studs Terkel and Jacob Riis, who excelled in their use of popular communication as an instrument for progressive social change, I’m sure many of us who work in development often cringe when issues of poverty are “covered” by our usually schizophrenic, ratings driven news media. Terkel only had audio, and Riis only had images, yet they were able to make profound impacts on how people saw and interacted with the world, contributing to significant social and economic change. As for us, now there are all these new online technologies – video and audio streaming, interactive flash, wikis, and even twitter (for what it’s worth) – but what talent has emerged for using them within development?While following the news on ARV shortages in Uganda, I was pleasantly surprised to find the Guardian newspaper in the UK is in the process of producing an excellent example of how these new technologies can be used to report on development in an exciting and substantive way. Last October, together with Amref and Farm Africa (funded by Barclays bank and Guardian readers), a team at the Guardian started to cover a village in Uganda, and will continue to do so over the next 3 years so that their audience can, as they put it, “find out how the money is spent, how development works (the successes and the failures) and how the lives of the sub-county's 25,000 inhabitants have changed.”What I like about the use of new media in this initiative isn’t any particular piece of content or tool, but how they tried to tie it all together: providing interactive contextual information; linking in daily news headlines; creating documentary video case studies to explore substantial issues; and tracking (and evaluating!) development projects over a three year period. Apart from the innovative use of online media, a project like this raises a host of programmatic issues and debates, which I will not attempt to address in this simple blog. Check it out for yourself, and let us know what you think!
