The New Media team at Al Jazeera just launched a new citizen journalism platform by the name of ‘Sharek‘ earlier today. (Sharek means contribute or share in Arabic.)
Sharek enables users to upload video material that they’ve recorded using their webcams, video cams or mobile phones; reporting the news that is happening around them.
Other than uploading content through the website, user media content can also be sent via email or directly from their mobiles.
More features will be added soon like live webcam recording, and live streaming from mobile phones.
Uploaded material will be reviewed by Al Jazeera journalists, who will choose newsworthy items and interesting commentary to feature on the ‘Sharek’ website, as well as on Al Jazeera as part of their coverage of a certain story.
This project expands on the successful results of previous trials by Al Jazeera with soliciting and collecting user submitted content on YouTube, and hopes to make it even easier for anyone to pass their content directly to the Al Jazeera team.
The project is pretty similar in concept to CNN’s iReport, with the exception of content being screened before publication in the case of ‘Sharek’ to maintain a certain level of quality.
Sharek is only available in Arabic for the time being, and so content uploaded through it is mainly for Al Jazeera Arabic, but an English version of the service is on the way.
# Sharek