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Iraq Media Junction

Strengthening social reporting and investigative journalism in Iraq
Context and Issue: 

After the fall of the Baathist regime in the war of 2003, hundreds of independent media outlets sprang up in Iraq. However, many of these newspapers, radio stations, television channels and other media have shallow roots and minimal institutional capacity. Many of them have difficulties sustaining professional journalistic standards. There is a corps of working journalists in Iraq who continue in the profession despite the repeated targeting of media workers – 47 of them were killed in 2007. Of the hundreds of newspapers that came into existence, most could not sustain professional standards or survive as sustainable operations and folded quickly.

Secondly, Iraqi media attention and resources tend to be focused on security and political issues, simply reporting the facts as they happen, with a minimum of analysis. Social reporting on relevant, post-conflict issues like health care, the environment, the position of women, poverty and so on, and investigative journalism remain, for the moment, an underdeveloped area in Iraq’s media scene.

Project's activities: 

Vitally, Iraq Media Junction seeks to broaden and deepen reporting on social issues of interest to Iraqi civil society as a whole. Its news agency partner, Aswat al-Iraq ‘s stories are regularly used by nearly 100 media outlets inside Iraq and many more outside the country. Iraq Media Junction’s project proposes to use the Aswat al-Iraq ‘s pivotal convening role in the media sector to strengthen journalism by embedding training capacity in-house for editorial and reporting functions, and for media monitoring, a crucial missing element in Iraq’s media scene.

The project is embedding social reporting in Iraq, training journalists in the skills they need to cultivate sources in society at large. Key to this is engaging civil society organisations directly and for that the project relies on the convening power of the other partner, Iraqi al-Amal, which has been capacity building in the CSO sector in and around Iraq since 1992. Al-Amal will select 20 to 30 of the CSOs it has worked with in the past few years and provide them with training in media relations. These groups will define communications policies for themselves and learn how to write press releases that are attuned to the dynamics of the media industry. Although Iraqi civil society is nascent, it is a hugely underused resource in Iraq’s media, both as sources in existing stories and to provide leads for new stories that currently lie beyond most reporters’ area of focus.

Participants and Beneficiaries: 

The immediate target groups of Iraqi Media Junction are a group of 60 journalists who already report on social affairs and the 20 to 30 civil society organisations chosen by al-Amal. But through them the project seeks to influence the final beneficiaries, who are the media and civil society sectors in Iraq. No more than 10 per cent of the trainees in either group will be staff members of either organisation.

There are up to 5,000 media workers in Iraq now, all told, and Aswat itself is in regular contact with over 500 of them through its existing core news service over the Web and by SMS text messaging. But through the two-stage training, culminating in 100 bursaries to write investigative features into complex social issues, the project will create a new reality and a group of journalists who are able to see and work beyond the flat statements of politicians and body counts, to report on issues such as women’s rights, the situation of young people in Iraq or the four million estimated internally displaced.
Civil society numbers thousands of groups, although many remain purely nominal on paper. But up to now it is the estimate of the three organisations submitting this application that they have had minimal impact on the country’s media. “Relations with the media are perhaps the weakest point of the CSOs we work with,” said Hanaa Edward, the director of al-Amal.

Outcomes: 

This project addresses directly two themes: freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and the freedom of opinion and expression, the right to information and freedom to communicate. It also addresses the other two themes – freedom of assembly and association, and freedom of movement – indirectly, in as much as most people's awareness of issues relating to these in Iraq, as anywhere else, are determined in large part by the quality of media coverage.

“Nearly all reporting of Iraq since 2003 has been about blood because that's what the new reporters entering the profession understood how to cover. This did not serve us well even at the height of the conflict but now that the security situation seems to be improving, it is disastrous. Iraq is more than a war. It is a whole complex society with numerous complex issues and many players, first among which are civil society institutions.”
Zuhair al-Jezairy, Executive Director of Internews' news agency partner, Aswat al-Iraq

PROJECT TEAM

  • Arjan De Wolff

    Country Director

  • Alissa Konstantinova

    Project Associate

PROJECT NEWS

 
2006.09.19
> Iraq Media Junction

Aswat al-Iraq (Voices of Iraq) in Brussels

Iraqi journalists invited to Brussels to introduce their online news serviceAswat al-Iraq is the first and unique independent news services agency in Iraq run and staff with Iraqi journalists. It was created in 2004 with the support from Reuters Foundation, UNDP and the Spanish International Cooperation Organisation to allow Iraqi journalists to share news stories around the 2005 elections. Using inexpensive new technology, and a web-based platform www.aswataliraq.info for gathering and distributing news and stories, Aswat al-Iraq quickly caught the attention of Iraqi media organisations from accros Iraq’s communities and gained a their committment and support. Aswat al-Iraq currently provides around 1700 stories a month

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Iraq, Governance And Human Rights, Media And Society, Media Professionalisation
 

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