By Craille Maguire Gillies

“Omigod, that is a freaking grenade. Holy fuck – explosion! Excuse my language here on the air.” That was Corrine McDermid narrating blurry but revealing live footage of a face-off between police and protesters at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, in September 2008. Police with smoke bombs, pepper spray, tear gas and protective gear had come to a head with activists. The activists advanced and cat-called the barricade of police who, like silent black-clad action figures, fired clouds of coloured smoke into the crowd, chasing the people farther and farther from the convention hall.

Corrine McDermid was one of a group of passionate volunteers armed with camcorders and cell phones to document the conflict for what was then a new non-profit media start-up called the Uptake. Footage fed to the Uptake’s command central was streamed over the Internet; even if the reporters were arrested or had their equipment confiscated, the dramatic, unvarnished stories would reach the world. The Uptake had, unlike other media organizations, predicted how action-packed the demonstrations outside the RNC would be, so it was ready with trained volunteers on the ground to tape the dramatic events unfold in real-time, expletives in all. “When things started happening on streets, which no one fully expected, we were ready to go live with it,” the Uptake’s founder and executive director Jason Barnett later said. The Uptake was founded because, as executive director Jason Barnett explained later, there was an opportunity to provide footage that no one else would have.

It was citizen journalism at its newest and rawest – a classic example of a nimble group of camera-wielding documentarians infiltrating areas traditional media either couldn’t access or didn’t have the resources to cover. But the Uptake was more than just gathering and training ad hoc journalists and media-savvy youth. Its triumph at the RNC was a preview of how rapid response coverage of major events is dramatically changing how stories are covered and who is covering them.

Those were early days, when the role of citizen journalists was fairly straightforward: buy cameras and cell phones, give them to a bunch of eager, hyper-connected, mostly young volunteers and see what they gather. Over the 16 months since Corrine McDermid’s coverage of the RNC showdown, the Uptake has evolved to become a much more complex model of a new media structure, one where the divisions between legacy media, social media, Twitter, traditional reporting and civic society has pretty much been obliterated. The Uptake also represents how diverse multi-platform groups are redefining relationships between traditional news, citizen journalist groups and a more nebulous, broader and influential group of what you might call activist-journalists.

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To witness the new relationships between magazines, bloggers, activists, advocacy non-profit groups and outfits like the Uptake, fast forward to December 2009 in Copenhagen for an even bigger media event than the Republican National Convention: COP15, the United Nations climate change talks. Climate change issues gathered steam throughout 2009 and COP15 turned into one of the biggest international political stories of the year. For 10 days, an estimated 3,000 accredited media and countless numbers of unaccredited bloggers and NGO delegates gathered to report on high-stakes negotiations within Copenhagen’s sprawling Bella Center – not to mention the escalating action on city streets.

The alliances that formed between NGOs and citizen journalist groups like the Uptake, not to mention publications such as the Nation, Grist and Mother Jones, reveal how journalists are working with the groups they once reported on. These partnerships are as intertwined and intricate as a circuit board on the UN-issued Sony Ericsson phones so many of the press and delegates loaned for the 10 days in Denmark. The Uptake, for instance, is part U.S.-based The Media Consortium, a coalition of members that include Salon, Mother Jones and the Nation.

Such alliances are mutually beneficial. News outlets don’t have the resources they once did, especially for international and investigative reporting. Then there are independent journalists who find themselves as lone correspondents with no editorial backup or multimedia support. NGOs, meanwhile, have the mass mobilization to spread large amounts of information quickly.

The Uptake, which received a third of its proposed non-profit funding for the story, could only send four people to Copenhagen: its executive director, executive producer, a writer-turned-impromptu videographer and a one-time CBS reporter now working at a public relations firm. When it came to COP15, “the idea was to go in with a unified voice with traditional media,” says the Uptake’s Barnett.

Other media groups faced similar financial challenges and many sent only one reporter or no reporters, relying instead on delegates who were attending for other reasons – for instance, with advocacy groups like Tcktcktck and 350.org (the latter fronted by journalist-turned-activist Bill McKibben). The establishment – Reuters, BBC and Agence France-Presse, for starters – might have been cloistered in rented white offices at the Bella Center, but plenty of others such as the Nation, Grist, Mother Jones, Guardian columnist and No Logo author Naomi Klein, shared resources with both the Uptake and the very NGOs they were covering. The Uptake provided video footage both to Tcktcktck and Klein, offering tech support to the former and reporting resources to the latter, while posting footage from a high-profile figure (Klein) with other high-profile figures (such as the head of Greenpeace International and Nigerian poet and activist Nnimmo Bassey) on its own site.

“Traditional approaches and tools are becoming obsolete and the interaction between reporters and their audiences has become both more dynamic and more perplexing,” Ivor Shapiro, a professor at the Ryerson School of Journalism, in Toronto, wrote in an editorial for the Canadian Journalism Project. “Verification, that so-called ‘essence’ of journalism, sometimes seems to have morphed from a standard to a question. Conventions surrounding social media and crowdsourcing are in flux, and the relationships between payers and pipers may be wild-westishly chaotic for a while to come.”

Roles also shifted with individuals. A contributing editor and blogger for Good, for instance, divided his time between blogging for the magazine’s website and working as a campaigner for Adopt-a-Negotiator, a youth-driven group that sent international youth to bird-dog government negotiators in attempts to influence environmental policy. Richard Graves, a 20-something television producer who founded the Fired Up Media and Project Survival Media, a citizen journalist program that trains environmental campaigners around the globe to tell local stories of climate change, was hired by NGO Tcktcktck to lead its media offerings (his official title is blogger and online campaigner). Working 18-hour days and looking exhausted by day three of the 10-day convention, Graves wore his activist hat (a term he dislikes) to cross-post Tcktcktck pieces on Huffington Post. Then, switching to his journalist cap, he wrote a feature on for Grist. When he got back to his home in Washington, he said he would go through all the images and footage gathered as part of his Tcktcktck gig and tease out of it an episode of Link TV’s online series Earth Focus.

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By now, you might wish you had a degree in cartography to map the connections between these journalists and campaigners. But there is, in fact, a geographic center to the activist-journalist relationships formed in downtown Copenhagen. In mid December, that geographic center could be found in the Huset, an expansive bunker-style café that Tcktcktck commandeered during COP15 as a home for independent media and bloggers who didn’t have official press accreditation to the convention center or who simply need a wired, collaborative workspace. (NGO delegates could access the convention center, but they couldn’t get inside the media center like Reuters, the New York Times and other print and broadcast groups.) Dubbed the Fresh Air Center, organizers described it as a “rapid response digital media hub.”

Outfitted with a few desktop computers and dozens of electrical outlets, it quickly became command-central for hundreds of bloggers whose scattered sticker-plastered MacBooks and camera gear across workstations and café tables. An enormous flat-screen TV near the bar streamed live footage – courtesy of the Uptake – from the very convention center that many bloggers couldn’t access. Every night at 7 p.m., Tcktcktck hosted live events (sponsored by the UN Foundation), including a talk with Amy Goodman of the daily radio-TV show Democracy Now! Correspondents spoke by Skype with colleagues back home, photographers uploaded hundred of images from demonstrations, press conferences and other events and bloggers typed madly in multitudes of languages.

One night, Graves wandered around stiff and semi-catatonic after spending 14 hours with a three-person team editing thousands of images from a 10,000-plus person march from the parliament to the Bella Center. Boxes from I Love Pizza were haphazardly stacked on the tables and half-empty pints of beer were propped next to laptops. “It was created for people who wanted to get involved, who care about the issue, but are sometimes locked out of process,” Graves said. “You need professional accreditation from NGO even to get in door [at COP15]. We wanted to give a way for independent journalists who might not be recognized by UN, which has incredibly stringent rules for online journalists. This is too important an issue to be kept out of public site.”

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To get a sense of the scope of coverage and the strange, intertwined relationships, you had to cover not only the official negotiations, but also the action in the streets. Naomi Klein had predicted that COP15 would be the Seattle of its generation, as contentious as the WTO protests in 1999. In Copenhagen, the Uptake was ready with its small team to watch the scene unfold. On a crisp Saturday afternoon, the Uptake’s Jacob Wheeler and Rick Fuentes walked alongside a mostly peacefully stream of demonstrators. The Politi – reportedly half of the total police force in Denmark – followed in step. Conspicuous among the crowd were the hundreds of ad hoc reporters with serious-looking digital SLRs slung around their necks.

After pushing through the thousands of people packed into the main square, Wheeler and Fuentes emerged at the head of the march. Tiny Canon high-def camera and microphone in his ungloved hands, Wheeler was cheerfully ready for anything. Though he’s a professional writer, his camera duties were new (the Uptake program mentors amateur reporters, but funding restrictions meant they couldn’t bring citizen journalists along. Wheeler, who lived in Denmark, offered an informed perspective to the street coverage). “When I write I have to be specific,” he said. “Today I’m not being specific. I just want a panoramic of what’s happening.” Like everyone else, he was hoping to get shots that would drive people to the Uptake’s website.

Groups of marchers filtered by, many in matching costumes like a four or five guys dressed in oversized white onesies and sagging diapers. There were people in polar bear hoods and others in T-shirts promoting their causes pulled over winter coats. A large contingent of indigenous groups led the pack. Many in the crowd carried signs with slogans such as “There is no Planet B” and “Nature Doesn’t Compromise.” Wheeler caught it all on tape, sometimes running up to interview people, other times panning the crowd. He didn’t have to edit it into a cohesive narrative; that wasn’t the point. He was mainly there to roll tape, let the crowd speak.

A couple hours into the march, Wheeler passed a woman with bleached blond hair, pink tights and a bouquet of fake flowers cruising along on roller-skates just ahead of a police van at the front of the crowd. She turned out to be a kind of citizen journalist herself, producing video footage for her “TV station,” which turned out to be a channel on YouTube that she created with her boyfriend. Fascinated, Wheeler shot several minutes of tape as the woman spoke in English mixed with Spanish and Danish about covering refugee camps. “Those are nice flowers,” he told her at one point. The woman smiled and showed a microphone hidden in the bouquet. “That was great!” he said after breaking away.

Wheeler checked in with Barnett by cell phone throughout the afternoon. Earlier, his partner Fuentes had “disengaged” and headed back to a rented apartment to upload footage from the first few hours. Wheeler kept going. On one call, Barnett passed on a lead from Twitter that Danish model-turned-photographer Helena Christensen was at the front of the march. Wheeler asked a few Danes directing foot traffic, but they didn’t know where Christensen might be. Queries with a local TV crew didn’t turn up anything, either. An interview would have been a small coup for he day, possibly driving more people to the site – where they’d discover other, deeper stories, such as Klein’s interview with Nnimmo Bassey. But it didn’t matter. When Wheeler finished the night, not far from the convention center where climate change negotiators were sequestered, he had hours of footage of an event that was dominating world media. He’d go back, upload the footage for all the media partners – Mother Jones, the Nation, Tcktcktck – to access and filter into the networks buzzing throughout the city and beyond.