By Maureen Paton
GuardianOctober 15, 2001
When Britain and the US were bombing Baghdad in December 1998, an Iraqi in an AOL chatroom was talking to 12,000 Americans about what it felt like to have the walls of his house shake while his six-year-old daughter cried. Quite an eye-opener for the citizens of a superpower who, at that time, had no experience of being hit by foreign bombs. This week, Sahar and Behjat, two Afghan feminists from the underground anti-Taliban organisation Rawa (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), have been messaging the world about their 24 hours of fear when allied air strikes came back to the Middle East. Meanwhile a Long Island book-keeper called Sandi, a single mother of two young boys, is trying to keep her fears about fanaticism in perspective in an online diary about her eight-year-old's grief over the death of his pet rabbit.
These people's hotline to the world was the website megastories.com, set up by the online global news agency Out There News. Launched four years ago as a unique first-person service, it's run from a converted attic in the north London area of Muswell Hill by ex-Reuters journalist Paul Eedle, 45. He wants to create a place on the internet where people can tell their own stories on their own terms "without journalists getting in the way," as he puts it. "We saw the power of the internet to do a different sort of world news reporting; although the internet came into play with Kosovo to a certain extent, this is the first fully fledged internet war, the biggest crisis that has unfolded in the internet era."
Its links with Yahoo and AOL bring Out There News a large American audience, while the two leading UK cable companies, Telewest and NTL, enable them to interact with a million subscribers in this country.
An experienced foreign correspondent who studied Arabic at Cambridge University, Eedle's interest in the Middle East, sparked by the 1973 oil crisis in the year he left school, runs in the family: his journalist wife Sue, a Haringey Labour councillor, was translating Bin Laden speeches five years ago for the London-based Mideast Mirror.
Above all, Eedle wanted to get beyond the conventional constraints of war reporting. "As soon as you start to write 300 words for a broadsheet, there are a whole series of journalistic conventions that come into play. What we found interesting was getting people to tell their story directly as they saw it. We allow people to say they don't know things, we allow them to say they haven't got the complete picture. What you end up with is a raw first-person account that feels like it's come straight out of the journalist's notebook."
In the theatre of war, the spin doctor has always been king with the black arts of disinformation and propaganda as his prime weapons of patriotism. In the current conflict, Out There News sees an urgent need to challenge the demonisation in both directions between east and west; Eedle is particularly incensed by Colin Powell's attempt to rein in the Emir of Qatar's satellite channel al-Jazeera, which scooped the world with its interview with Bin Laden, because of what Powell perceived to be an anti-American bias. "It's the best independent source of news in the Middle East; no way is it a rabble-rouser," insists Eedle.
He also wants humbler voices to be heard, such as the online diary from a girl at boarding school in Kashmir. "It challenges stereotypes of Islam, because this project is strictly Islamic but promotes the education of women and is funded by Muslim Aid here in Britain. There was little education for those girls before they moved here. Just because they're veiled up to the eyes doesn't mean that they don't want to become doctors or other professionals."
Eedle's staff consists of 25-year-old content editor Heather Sharp, responsible for developing the personal diary format that came into its own with the foot-and-mouth epidemic earlier this year, part-timer Becky Vincent and a network of up to 40 stringers around the globe.
Crucial to its coverage of the current war is a regional co-ordinator in Islamabad, Muddassir Rizvi, who helps to channel diaries in from people who are not on the net and can't speak English. Another multimedia journalist in the field, the Pakistan-based Alex Smailes, filed an online report this week about a Peshawar demonstration by Bin Laden supporters which became so violent that Smailes reported finding a severed finger in the dust. "He's an outstanding photojournalist who covered Chechnya and Macedonia for us and is very good at working away from the press pack," says Eedle.
"Our big excitement for the future is video, because TV news is the dominant form of reporting. The internet will become more like TV as broadband access spreads. We would like to help the spread of a multi-media video literacy where people can tell their own stories on video and see them picked up by TV and video stations. Our aim is not just to publish that information, but to build the skills of ordinary people round the world."
Eedle had already decided to set up Out There News with former Reuters colleague John West, a pioneer of online journalism in Britain and winner of an Internet Journalist of the Year award, a year before the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Between them, they had covered four wars and reported from four continents in 30 years of journalism. But his experiences in covering the death of Diana confirmed to Eedle they were on the right track in trying to report the news from the ground up.
"It was the first time I had seen the conventional media miss the story for several days - even though the story was there on the internet. The night after she died, I sat on a bench outside Kensington Palace with a laptop connected to a mobile phone in a Virgin Net chatroom; we were doing a series of live chats with Virgin at the time. All around me in the darkness were people wanting to express their opinions, and that night you could have abolished the monarchy. There wasn't the mawkish sentiment we saw emerging very quickly in the public media, but a deep and simple emotion that combined grief with a complete revulsion about what the Royal Family stood for."
According to Eedle, there are two main reasons why the media have so often missed the big story. "First, there are conventions of acceptable public discourse, and second, you need to be swimming among it to feel it. Journalists are now getting far more email feedback from their audience, so they are being held to account by readers who might know as much about the story as they do.
"There's been a huge public debate over Reuters' refusal to use the word 'terrorism', particularly in the States. When I worked at Reuters, that debate wouldn't have come into the open because Reuters was just a wholesaler, whereas now it's one of the biggest sources going directly to readers on the net. One of the centrepieces of this conflict is the definition of what terrorism is. The word terrorist is used to delegitimise and dehumanise an enemy. It becomes very difficult when a war is on for people to debate openly, not because of overt censorship but because of peer pressure and what's allowable. And the internet guarantees a degree of anonymity and safety."
Currently Out There News, which funds itself from online advertising, grants and donations, is seeking charitable status and hoping to expand by syndicating "eminently publishable" packages of ordinary people's stories. It has teamed up with three similarly minded organisations - the Institute of War and Peace Reporting, Index On Censorship and the Panos Institute - to bring together pooled resources in the website crisisreport.org.
"I can't say for the moment that American policy-makers are glued to what we are doing, but that's not my measure of success," shrugs Eedle. "What matters is the quality of the dialogues that we are able to create between people of different views; if you remove some of the filters in the media places, people can form their own judgments. There's something enormously powerful about producing a credible world news service from an attic, and we couldn't have done that in the pre-internet days. But now the infrastructure is available to anyone; and that's liberating."
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