Volunteer site with Harvard roots spreads citizen journalism’s voice

As part of its reporting, she said, the site turned to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, where other bloggers and hundreds of ordinary people stepped into the role of citizen journalist and shared their experiences, cellphone photos, and videos online.

“There was a whole army of people who did the job of reporters, sharing what was happening on the streets,’’ said al-Hussaini, 38, who lives in Bahrain and is the organization’s Middle East and North Africa editor.

Soon after the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on Friday, the volunteer bloggers for Global Voices in East Asia put together coverage of the devastation, sharing citizen videos and translating posts on Twitter, including calls for help from people stranded on the upper floors of buildings.

Over the weekend, with fears fueled by the prospect of a second explosion at a nuclear plant, they monitored the conversation on the social Web, reporting how people were exchanging information to keep safe and questioning the use of nuclear energy in an earthquake-prone region.

“Our job is to curate the conversation that is happening all over the Internet with people who really understand what is going on,’’ said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Tokyo bureau chief for CNN who founded Global Voices with Ethan Zuckerman, a technologist and Africa expert, while they were fellows at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We amplify, contextualize, and translate what these conversations are and why they are relevant.’’

MacKinnon and Zuckerman said the network grew out of an international meeting of bloggers held at Harvard in late 2004. They saw an opportunity to leverage content produced on blogs and social media sites like Twitter outside the United States and to help create a global community for them and their work.

“Our goal is to give you the voices of the people in a country like Tunisia, day in and day out, whether they are cementing rebellion or talking about local news and sports scores,’’ Zuckerman said. “We don’t parachute in. We are there all the time. “