My name is Ahmed Shihab-Eldin.
I'm Palestinian by blood, American by birth, Kuwaiti by family refuge, Egyptian by upbringing,
Austrian by adolescence, and curious by nature.
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I think anyone's a reporter.
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I think my upbringing and having lived, but been from so many places, but also not been
from any one place in particular definitely influenced me in a very serious way.
Borders and boundaries and divisions, all of that, to me always seemed very counter-intuitive,
almost unnatural.
It's definitely influenced me by making me be more open and more curious and inquisitive.
I think that might actually be why I went into the field.
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What is a netizen?
I really, I mean, it's an interesting…it's a very curious term, right, Because it's basically
a citizen of the internet.
The beautiful thing about the internet and for example, the effect it has on the media
is it really levels the playing field.
Any kind of big media personality compared to the blogger in say Morocco or Jordan, they're
both netizens and to me, you know, that's kind of a…that's kind of a novel thing.
I mean I think anyone's a reporter.
Anybody, whether they're citizen journalists, whatever you want to call them, they're taking
information with their mobile phone.
They're filming in Syria, you know, or in Bahrain, you know, tear gas or whatever it
might be and they're uploading it to the internet.
They're reporting that, you know.
We don't want the news told to us, we want to be part of that process.
I think news consumers are becoming producers and it's exciting.
I mean it makes the job for journalists that much harder because as a journalist now you
have so many more sources.
I mean, the very notion of breaking news itself is broken and there's nothing wrong in that
and if people are afraid of that in the business, I really think that just points to arrogance
or a fear of not having a job.
People who are so quick to dismiss the multiplicity of voices that social media, that the internet,
that technology provides us with access, I don't think their hearts in the right place.
There can be a symbiotic kind of relationship between citizen journalists, activists, netizens,
whatever you want to call them, people on the ground, who understand the culture.
They can fill that gap that a parachute journalist, know you, someone who comes in only when the
story is hot or trending or whatever, can't potentially add to the story.
If you're dedicated to really understanding the story and really getting to the heart
of it, you will find that there's so much value to these conversations and the information
and photos and videos that are being shared amongst the people who really care about the
story because, after all, that's their life.
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I think a journalist's role is to contextualize, to report, to try and be factual, to use stories
to illustrate the human condition.
I also would add to that, which many people would stop there, it's to be progressive.
Progressive meaning to move society forward.
That's where I think transparency for me in journalism, as a journalist, should be more
important than objectivity because objectivity is a fallacy.
It's unattainable.
How many times you reference something in an article, where you put it in the article,
all those minor things let alone your culture, your religion, your background, who you're
married to, what your sister's niece does on the weekend that you sometimes go and visit.
I mean, you know, our lives are so multi-faceted that to presume that professionally we can
distance ourselves so much and provide an "objective" view is, I think, not as important
or as alluring to me as providing a view that is truthful and the truth sadly is subjective.
So it's my truth, but it's, you know, in good faith and as long as you're transparent and
accountable in your intentions and your motivate is to try and get at the truth, that to me
is where journalism is headed.
I'm Ahmed Shihab-Eldin and you're watching THNKR.