“I never really thought myself as a journalist,” British blogger Eliot Higgins says. And yet, he broke some of the most important stories on the Syrian conflict in the last two years, while working from his Leicester home.
Eliot Higgins started his blog, Brown Moses, in 2012, as a hobby. Now, he plays a crucial role in monitoring and tracking weapons used in Syria.
“When I started posting, the first thing I was looking at was something simple: what weapons was the Syrian opposition using? I just looked at the videos that were online,” he says.
“YouTube videos, anyone can look at them, they are sources of information,” he adds.
Some of the videos uncovered and documented by Higgins include the use of cluster bombs in 2012, which the Syrian government denied using, and the use of so-called “barrel bombs”, which the Russian government denied they exist.
Higgins, beginning of 2013, first spotted a cache of weapons from the former Yugoslavia. He used stills taken from YouTube videos and jihadi websites to show how Jabhat al-Nusra fighters, in the southern province of Deraa, have been using weapons financed and smuggled into Syria by Saudi Arabia, with the collusion of the West.
He now works on a project about the August 21st Sarin attack, on the Ghouta agricultural belt around Damascus. He recently managed to geolocate a third area where chemical weapons landed.
Is he a sort of a tech-savvy wizard? Is he a maestro of google map? Maybe he is but he is also a self-taugh and hard working person.
He goes over more than 900 YouTube channels every day to find new footage uploaded by people in Syria. The videos come from activists, rebel brigades, Islamist groups as well as from President Bashar al-Assad’s supporters and state TV.
“The opposition produces a lot of videos. They are the ones living in villages where the bombs have been dropped,” he says.
His activity is time-consuming. It is unlikely that newsrooms would allow members of their staff to spend hours, days and weeks surfing online and scrutinising hundreds of YouTube channels to “potentially” break a story.
And yet, digitals tools such as geolocalisation, mapping or data collection are part of the future of newsgathering. It is not necessarily the whole future but it will, without any doubt, complete traditional journalism.
It is not a substitute for traditional war reporting and it won’t replace the eyewitness role of foreign correspondent but it can help to tell the story, particularly in places such as Syria, where it became very difficult and dangerous for conventional media organisations to report from.
If a British blogger with no training in weapons, human rights research and journalism can do it, why not journalists?
Mathilde Guenegan is a postgraduate student on the MA in International Multimedia Journalism
