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BBC World Service can offer citizens equipment and training for Your Story project

Posted: 12/03/09 By: Judith Townend

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Your Story is the BBC World Service's citizen journalism project, running since June 2008. Anyone can send in ideas for stories and news reports, or personal stories, photos, audio and video.

Nina Robinson, a senior broadcast journalist at the BBC World Service, runs the project and works with individuals to pursue report ideas and will provide them with recording equipment, and training and advice, she says. Robinson then edits material received.

Some of it ends up on the blog and some of it ends up on air: on Newshour, The World Today, Europe Today, World Update and Outlook. Other bits are featured online.

"We've had contributors from all over the world," Robinson tells Journalism.co.uk. "Most of them have a burning issue they care about and want to research it further by doing a report on it," she says.

For example, there was 19 year old Ricardo from a favela in Brazil on living with violence; David Urbina who is HIV positive and covered an AIDS conference in Mexico; Xuanxuan, a student who reported from the Beijing Olympics; and a group of British teenage mothers who discussed issues on World Contraception Day.

"The list goes on," Robinson adds. "From my point of view, every single time someone is encouraged to get in touch with the Your Story project and raise an issue that we might not have otherwise looked at, it's a success," she says.

"It's all about communicating with people. I see it a bit as a democratisation of the news process. Rather than the BBC as a news organisation dictating the news agenda, we're listening to what people are telling us, taking in their opinions, thoughts, sometimes eyewitness accounts - whether they be in the form of photos, videos, or opinion pieces."

Personal highlights for Robinson include the time she worked with Baktash Siawash in Afghanistan - reporting on a school girl whose face was splashed with acid by the Taliban; and when she covered Obama's inauguration, gathering 'grassroots perspectives'. Robinson also flags up a series of reports from citizen journalists on the economy in Detroit.

Now, the team is working to build the blog to incorporate further with the World Have Your Say (WHYS) blog community.

"Eventually we might have citizen journalists in every country in the world, someone who will be available to give us an on the ground personal view if there's a relevant news event, especially in those hard to reach areas where we do not always have reporters - Riyadh, Darfur, Gaza, for example," she says.

"We are continuing to send out equipment," she adds. Videos, such as the promotional one at this link, are intended to build exposure.

The blog itself is hosted on Wordpress and looks quite different from BBC style on the main sites. "We decided to blog outside the BBC because of the developing technology and its ease of use," Robinson explains.

"We are also trying to reach people who may not be listeners of the BBC World Service," she says.

Twitter is another new focus for the project - a recent blog post described Robinson's enthusiasm for the project. "I'm trying to do more on Twitter - I'm a convert and excited about the possibilities it offers to reach out to a wider community."

The project works alongside other BBC projects, she says. "It fits into other world service news programmes as part of the multimedia hub here in news and current affairs. I offer material to programmes to run and also offer ideas for debate and interview, so there's a lot of communication going on. They are also asking me to get equipment to certain people they think would make good citizen journalists."

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