At a time when there are few news organizations with the capital to put reporters on the ground in Haiti, social media is helping to fill the gap with information and financial relief for victims of the earthquake.
- More than $1,000,000 has been raised so far through the Red Cross’ mobile donation program, according to Jared Cohen, who is on the State Department’s policy planning staff. The Red Cross started a program today, allowing the public to donate $10 by texting “Haiti” to 90999. Music artist Wyclef Jean is also running a mobile donation campaign for his charity Yele. If you text ‘Yele’ to 501 501, $5 dollars will be donated. Both programs automatically add the charges to your cellphone bill.
- 1,500 status updates a minute mentioning “Haiti” are running through Facebook, according to Andrew Noyes, the company’s manager of public policy communications.
- Haiti URLs have seen a 1578% increase in traffic and a 5407% jump in bandwidth usage, according to Zscaler, a cloud-based security service for web traffic.
A number of citizen journalism projects are providing news and media from the ground. Global Voices, a non-profit blog aggregator for international news, has created Twitter lists of people on the ground in Haiti. So has The New York Times. The Boston Globe’s Big Picture also has a truly heart-wrenching collection of photos, which is where the top picture comes from.
Ushahidi, a non-profit project that uses mobile phones to crowdsource news and information in times of crisis, started up a Haiti site where hospitals can show what services they offer and people can post messages to search for family or friends.
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