Successful Kickstarter campaign led to Bellingcat - website for citizen investigative journalists created by Eliot Higgins aka Brown Moses.
You can read more about interesting details related to Bellingcat in our interview with one of the world’s most popular citizen journalists and Bellingcat founder - Eliot Higgins.
Q: How did you get interested in citizen journalism?
A: There was never a point where I thought “hey, why don’t I try some citizen journalism”, I really just started a blog to write about things I thought were interesting for myself and it grew from there. I’ve never really even thought about citizen journalism until people started asking me if I was one.
Q: What inspired you to start Kickstarter campaign for Bellingcat?
A: Really it was two main things, bringing together great writers who work with open source information, and showing other people how to do it. It seemed like a vast, untapped resource, and I wanted to get more people working with it.
Q: Bellingcat - creative name. Tell us more about it.
A: It comes from the fable of “Belling the cat“, where a group of mice were scared of a cat, so they decided they’d put a bell around it’s neck to act as a warning, but realised none of them knew how they could achieve that. So, with the site we are showing people how to bell the cat, so to speak.
Q: You got excellent support from people regarding your site. What are your expectations now?
A: I’m working on satellite projects for Bellingcat, one is called Syria Right Now, which will use a platform developed by Right Now Digital to collate and organise social media accounts used by Syrian opposition groups, making it easier to track the conflict. Another is a network of investigation groups examining crime and corruption using business records we’re setting up with the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Hacks/Hackers London, which is starting in London, then moving onto New York, and then after that cities across the world.
Q: And what are your plans for Bellingcat in the future?
A: Continue to create new projects and work with new platforms to explore the possibilities for using open source information.
Q: What is it that you are looking for from your users?
A: I hope at the least we’ll inspire our readers to do their own investigations using the tools and techniques we write about.
Q: As a citizen journalist what kind of problems do you encounter most often?
A: None really, I just do what I do using the tools and resources available.
Q: How do you see media today, both mainstream and citizen?
A: I think mainstream organisations need to start seeing the importance of using open source information to direct their own work, and discover stories, otherwise risk being left behind by those organisations that do.
Q: The way you see citizen journalism in the future.
A: Hopefully we’ll see more people learning the tools and techniques I’ve shared, and being more involved with news events.
We would like to thank Eliot Higgins for his time and wish Bellingcat great success in their future work!