Djallal Malti, freelance journalist
D.R
|
News is what Arthur
McEwen, |
Algeria-Interface uses
the Internet to put out ‘completely impartial news’ about Algeria
People had dreamed about publishing unbiased news of the crisis in Algeria
but saw no easy way to do it. Until the Internet came along.
Journalists have long been unable to work freely in Algiers. The independent press1
was the first target of the authorities and the armed factions, which had a shared
interest in snuffing out dissent. Algerian journalists, faced with censorship and
more and more of their number being killed, tried to start newspapers outside the
country. But their efforts failed, often because of lack of resources or because
would-be financial backers lacked credibility. The only real successes were a handful
of supplements on Algeria written by Algerian journalists and published in the international
press, which showed there was a demand for news about the country.
Noureddine Khelassi was one of the journalists who dreamed of starting up a newspaper
abroad, though he had no funds to do so. He had worked on the independent press at
the end of the 1980s as editor of the daily paper La Nation. But like many of his
colleagues, he was forced to flee Algiers in 1993 after an attempt to kill one of
his journalists. The paper closed on March 30 that year. Its farewell editorial said
that “the present situation makes it no longer possible to publish a newspaper which
believes in democracy, pluralism and respect for human rights.”
The turning-point came after Khelassi met Rolf Gauffin, a retired Swedish diplomat
and a well-known expert on the Middle East and the Maghreb. In the mid-1990s, Gauffin
had covered Algeria as a journalist, so he knew how hard it was to get unbiased news.
Every time he visited the country, he was assigned bodyguards by the authorities.
All foreign journalists were obliged to have bodyguards to “guarantee their security”
but in fact this was the best way for the government to restrict their activities
and intimidate people they spoke to.
In 1996, a plan for an independent mainstream newspaper reporting on political, economic
and social matters was presented to the Swedish Development Agency (SIDA). “Our idea
was to set up a paper written by Algerians for Algerians, with reporters living and
working inside the country, and so give Algerian journalists a chance to write freely,”
says Gauffin. But the project was soon dropped in favour of a news-paper which would
be put on the Internet.
Building
a network of correspondents
Publishing on the Internet
meant minimal production costs and free distribution. Few Algerians have access to
the Internet, but the Swedish backers counted on people’s ingenuity to boost the
paper’s readership by printing it out and photocopying it. Another big advantage
was that the Internet would give the paper a worldwide readership, especially as
it would be in both English and French. “The Internet enabled us to exist. Without
it, we probably would never have come out,” says Gauffin.
As soon as SIDA released the funds, with help from the Olof Palme International Centre,
a Swedish NGO, the small team on the paper, which was called Algeria-Interface, started
work. They were based in Paris and consisted of an accountant, two part-time journalists
and an editor, Djamel Benramdane. They soon found an office and bought computers.
Within weeks they had set up an Internet web site.
Benramdane had been working for some time on the trickiest aspect of the project:
during his many trips to Algeria he had set about building up a network of reliable
and professional correspondents. The network, consisting of a dozen people, soon
got off the ground. For the moment, the reporters prefer not to have bylines in print,
partly to protect themselves but also to avoid making fellow journalists jealous,
since Algeria-Interface pays its contributors a lot more than they would get in Algiers.
A crucial
interview
Algeria-Interface went
online at the beginning of November 1999 with the declared aim of “reporting the
news completely objectively while remaining faithful to the basic principles of freedom
of expression and press freedom, defence of human rights and promotion of democratic
values”. The paper was launched quietly at a reception in Paris. “We sent invitations
to the Algerian, Tunisian and Moroccan embassies,” says Taoufiq Derradji, the head
of Inforum, the publishers of Algeria-Interface, “but only the Moroccans turned up.”
The real test came a few weeks later, when Abdelkader Hachani, the number three man
in the former Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), was murdered in Algiers on December
13. “At the time, negotiations were in full swing between the regime and the Islamists
over how to apply the law on civil peace,” says Benramdane, “so I thought it would
be interesting to ask Hachani what he thought. An Algeria-Interface reporter met
him the day before he was killed. As soon as we heard he was dead, we put the interview
online, describing how we’d got it. We weren’t happy about the situation, but it
was a minor scoop and we were mentioned by many other media, including the French
daily Le Monde.”
That day the site was visited by a record 6,000 people. Algeria-Interface usually
gets a fair number of hits, even though at that time it could not be found by any
search engine. “We had 90,000 hits between December 1 and 13, and we’ve had 550,000
since we started in November,” says Derradji. “Easily a third of them have come from
France, which has a large Algerian community. Another third have come from Algeria
and the rest from countries such as Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, where there
are sizeable communities of Algerians who have been exiled because of the conflict.”
Gearing
up for real-time working
Encouraged by this
success and with a large amount of news to put online, Algeria-Interface switched
from fortnightly to weekly. “We’re now preparing to work in real time,” says Benramdane,
“but we’ve got a lot of problems to solve before we get there.”
First there is the matter of the Internet in Algeria itself, where there is only
one Internet service provider, CERIST, which is controlled by the government and
sometimes people have to make dozens of attempts before they can connect. The authorities
are afraid that they won’t be able to control the Internet, so they have still not
allowed it to develop freely.
Another problem is how to involve local journalists. They are sometimes totally taken
up with their regular jobs and many have not yet visited the Algeria-Interface web
site. “The Internet isn’t yet part of people’s daily lives and some are not sure
whether a journal can be a serious enterprise if it isn’t printed on paper,” says
Benramdane.
But most of all there are problems of funding. The Internet means about a two-thirds
saving in production costs, but overall costs are still nearly $24,000 a month. “The
fact that the money comes from Sweden–a neutral country with a solid anti-colonial
tradition where there was strong popular and official support for Algeria’s war of
independence–gives immediate credibility to Algeria-Interface,” says Gauffin. “But
we know we have to broaden our sources of funding to ensure long-term viability.”
Substantial investment is needed to finance serious investigative reporting and news
gathering. The Internet is a valuable tool for disseminating unbiased news and getting
round some kinds of censorship, but it does not solve the more important problem
of financial independence.
1. Usually defined as newspapers controlled neither by the government nor a political party and seeking to publish non-partisan news.
http://www.algeria-interface.com/
