Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Anas Aremeyaw Anas can’t show you his face, but his name carries enough weight. Famous in Ghana for his investigative journalism, Anas’ stories like “Enemies of the nation,” about corruption at customs in the Port of Tema, have blown the cover on crime all over Africa.

He started 14 years ago, when he had just come out of college. He received a tip that police were taking bribes from kids in the streets, so he decided to go undercover selling peanuts. Thus began his dedication to exposing corruption through immersive journalism, following 3 basic principles: naming, shaming and jailing.

Anas has gone undercover as a Catholic priest in a Bangkok prison and as a bartender in a Chinese sex mafia ring in Ghana. Thanks to Anas the mafia men in the latter story will be in prison for the next 40 years for the abuse of the sex workers.

Just last month Anas broke a story with the film Spirit Child, about the tragic practice in northern Ghana of killing deformed children believed to carry ill omens. Anas brought a prosthetic baby from London with a fake deformity and caught men in the act of preparing a concoction to have the baby killed. The police were standing by, and court proceedings are happening now. In “Spell of the albino” Anas follows the albino limb trade in Tanzania, where albinos are regularly killed because their body parts are believed to be lucky in witchcraft rituals. He went undercover as a businessman looking to get rich and caught the practice on film for the first time.

And today at TED, Anas breaks his latest story. He’s been undercover for the past six months at Nsawam Prison in southern Ghana, where conditions are inhumane. He shows a shocking video of a room in the prison full of dead bodies piled atop one another. The sanitation conditions in the prison are unspeakably bad, and it’s easier to get heroin, cocaine and cannabis in the prison than out. He will be breaking the story in Ghana in a month.

Not everyone has been a fan of Anas’ work. Some accuse him of a breach in ethics. But as he says, what’s the point of a journalist who doesn’t benefit society? He concludes: “What the evil man has destroyed, the good man has built.” So fight, and build again.

“This is how war starts—one day you’re living your ordinary life. You’re planning to go to a party, you’re taking your children to school, you’re making a dentist appointment,” says di Giovanni in today’s talk, given at TEDxWomen. “The next thing, the telephones go out. The TVs go out. There are armed men on the streets. Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation.”

In today’s gut-wrenching talk, di Giovanni describes some of the moments that have stuck with her over her years as a war correspondent, and shares what she has learned from covering many of the bloodiest conflicts of the last two decades. She says that her mind often wanders back to Sarajevo.

“I had the honor of being one of those reporters who lived through that [three-year] siege. And I say I had the honor and privilege of being there because it taught me everything — not just about being a reporter, but about being a human being,” says di Giovanni. “Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos, I learned how ordinary people could share food with their neighbors, raise their children, drag someone who’s being sniped at from the middle of the road, even though you yourself were endangering your life.”

In 2004, di Giovanni had a son. And in this talk, she explains why she opted to cover the war in Iraq despite having a baby at home. She also shares why, less than a week after speaking at TEDxWomen, she headed back to Damascus to continue covering the conflict in Syria.

“I believe it needs to be done. I believe a story there has to be told,” she says. “What I see is incredibly heroic people fighting for things — like democracy — that we take for granted every single day … All I am is a witness. My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless … To shine a light in the darkest corners of the world.’”

To hear what an important and heart-breaking job this can be, watch di Giovanni’s talk. And below, read some of the incredible stories that she has written about wars over the years.

The Balkans:

“Christmas in Sarajevo,” The Sunday Times, Dec. 1992

On Christmas eve, the city of Sarajevo was pitched into darkness except for the occasional flare from the tracer rounds and the sound of the sporadic shells. On this day, like so many others before, The Susko family went to bed at about 9pm their only escape from the unlit cold.

On Christmas day light snow began to fall again and the temperature dropped to -5C. Mario Susko awoke to the sound of shelling in the borrowed unheated room where he lives with his wife, Maria, and his daughter Alexandra, 17. Wrapped in blankets on the floor where he sleeps, he could feel the detonations, but for some time now the 52-year-old Catholic Croat has not felt frightened.

“After three weeks without water, one month without electricity and eight months of total siege, I no longer feel fear,” he says. Keep reading » 

“From the Kosovo Frontline,” March to June 1999

It was the heaviest night of the Nato bombing here in Kosovo. The commander with the kind face, a former hero of the war in Bosnia, told me and the soldiers in my tent to sleep with our boots on.

He was right. At 3am, the blackness of night was shattered by the terrifying crack of a Serb MiG dropping cluster bombs on us. “Go. Go. Go,” ordered the Swede, a former UN soldier. We tumbled in the darkness to a nearby muddy ravine and threw ourselves on to the ground. It was not easy, the trench is used by soldiers as a latrine. Keep reading » 

“Goodbye to All That,” The Times Magazine, December 2004

I am not a big television fan, but recently a friend rang and told me to watch Prime Suspect. It was a two-parter in which Helen Mirren was investigating the murder in London of a Bosnian refugee who had witnessed a brutal massacre during the Balkan conflict. I watched it. The next night I stayed home to watch the second part. There was an actor I knew from Sarajevo playing the bad guy, and there was Helen Mirren, slowly going mad as she became more and more embroiled in the case. Eventually, she became obsessed. She disobeyed her boss, sacrificed her job and flew to Bosnia at her own expense to investigate the massacre. Strange behaviour. But I recognised that look in her eyes.

My friend rang me after the second part ended. “What was it with Bosnia,” he asked, “that made people so obsessive?” I could not answer, but I have been thinking. I began reporting the Bosnian war in 1992, and while I am fortunate enough not to have been injured or to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, not a day goes by in which the conflict does not enter my mind. I met my husband in Sarajevo. I forged some of my closest friendships in Bosnia. And, in a horrible way, my most powerful memories come from those years. Keep reading » 

Africa:

“Dark Days in Sierra Leone,” The Times of London, May 2000

West of Petitfu Junction, where the road turns to red dust and the bush grows darker, the villagers fly white neutrality flags over their mud shacks. It is their way of saying that they are peaceful civilians, a feeble protection from the Revolutionary United Front rebels, who are quickly advancing into this territory.

Further up the road that leads to Port Loko, there is real panic. The people who live in this bush are simple people who farm potatoes, grow rice and tap the palm trees for oil. This area was once held by the RUF, and the rebels know what the rebels will do if they come back. So the people are fleeing, walking quickly in the heat of the day, or pedaling on rusty old bicycles, their children walking alongside them. Keep reading » 

“Nobody’s Children,” The New York Times Magazine, February 2002 

Early morning, Mogadishu. The wet equatorial heat is rising from the chewed up streets, and the gunmen are already working. Truckloads of militiamen, hanging off the back of pickup trucks cruise the neigbourhoods of South Mogadishu. They chew quat, the bitter narcotic leaf imported from Kenya; wave Kalashnikovs above their heads, and stand defiantly in position behind anti-aircraft guns chained to the back of the trucks.

The American marines used to call them Skinnies, and it still makes the gunmen laugh, because it makes them seem innocent and sweet, like a cappuccino at Starbucks, which they are not. They are young men, some of them boys. They wear dark Gucci-style sunglasses, bandannas around their heads and Homeboy gear – jeans slung low, t-shirts, flip-flops. Some of them are barely into their teens, their weapons bigger than their tiny frames, but they know how to shoot and kill and ambush and raid. Keep reading » 

“A Civil Tongue: South Sudan Tries to Learn English,” Harper’s, March 2012

When South Sudan, the world’s newest country, was born in July 2011, after nearly half a century of on-and-off civil war that left as many as 2.5 million dead, it was greeted with enormous expectations. A contest for a new national anthem was sponsored. Beauty pageants for Miss South Sudan were held. Carpetbaggers and scalawags from all over East Africa and as far as China, India, and even the United States descended on the capital, Juba.

Last autumn, I visited the country during a brief respite before another flare-up of looting and massacres that killed, as of this writing, an estimated 3,000 people. Driving past a quarry every morning, I saw exhausted-looking women wearing ripped nightgowns and rubber shower caps over their heads crouched roadside, pounding large rocks into smaller rocks, inhaling noxious dust. Keep reading » 

The Middle East:

“The Last Days of Iraq,” Vanity Fair, April 2003

On Ash Wednesday, a few weeks before war was declared on Iraq, I went to mass in St. Mary’s Church on Palestine Street in Baghdad. The mass was in Armaic, the ancient language of Jesus, and around me the Iraqi Christians knelt and prayed for peace. On their faces was etched all the fear and anxiety of the past few weeks as the diplomatic process unravelled and the world fought over whether or not their country would be bombed. A few of the women, wearing lacy white mantillas on their heads, were crying.

Towards the end of the mass, three American peace activists, stood and addressed the congregation. Over the past few months that I had been in Baghdad, there had been a flurry of pointless peace activities, beginning with the arrival of the actor Sean Penn in December, to a host of human shields from Seattle and Michigan, to men of the cloth spreading words of faith. One of the priests, from Washington D.C. said slowly, “We hope we carry the hopes and fears of the people of the world in the quest for peace.” It was meant to be reassuring, but the congregation looked wary. Keep reading » 

“Gateway to Jihad: Pakistan’s Phantom Border,” Vanity Fair, June 2008

It has been more than 60 years since Pakistan was carved out of India by the British as a moderate, Muslim nation, a refuge rather than an Islamic state. For most of those six decades, Pakistan has been a friend of America’s. Since 9/11, it has been a so-called partner in the war on terror.

Up to a point. Newsweek recently called Pakistan arguably the most dangerous country on earth, harboring as it does a lethal combination of mostly foreign-born al-Qaeda terrorists and a native-born Taliban movement that is supported by its Taliban brethren across the border in Afghanistan. (American intelligence calls them “Big T” and “Little T.”) Given that the border is ridiculously porous and difficult to patrol, Pakistan has become a kind of haven for potential terrorists eager to be set loose into the wider world. Keep reading » 

“On Reporting from Syria,” The New York Times, October 2012

I took the first of several visits to Syria in June 2012, legally, with a rare journalist’s visa, to report from the government side.

I flew from my home in Paris to Beirut, then got a driver and traveled to Syria. Damascus, the world’s oldest inhabited city, seemed to carry on business as usual — though there were already the car bombs, and the wounded soldiers in the hospital. I could look out the window of my hotel, the Dama Rose, and see women in bikinis drinking beer to hip-hop music at pool parties, then see the smoke of bombings in the background. I had worked in the Middle East for two decades since I was a cub reporter, but this was my first time in Syria. Keep reading » 

“Denial is Slipping Away as War Arrives in Damascus,” The New York Times, October 2012

Rifa was growing frantic. Her husband had called to say that he and her brother were stuck on their way home from work outside the Syrian capital, normally a 25-minute drive. There was fighting in a northern suburb, he said, and traffic was frozen.

Tensions rose as the hours passed. It is never good to be out after dark in Damascus now, especially trapped in a traffic jam, unable to flee. Finally, Rifa’s husband called again. They had escaped and returned to their workplace to pass the night, another concession to their changing world. Keep reading » 

And read much more from di Giovannie at her website, JanineDiGiovanni.com.

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2012 was the year of radical openness at TED. In that spirit, while our office is closed for winter break, TED’s editorial staffers have selected their favorite talks of the year, giving you a peek into both our process and our personalities. We hope you enjoy..

TED editorial meetings are a flurry of sound. As our team gathers on Thursday afternoons to discuss what talks we want to run and how we want to frame them, the room becomes a bumper car arena of opinions. There are clever insights, gentle jokes, bouts of laughter and passionate appeals — always words, words, words. So we know that we’ve uncovered a truly special talk when the words dissolve and all that’s left in the room is the palpable energy of silence.

That’s exactly what happened the first time the editorial team screened Giles Duley’s talk from TEDxObserver.

“It’s a bit of a joke for the editor of a paper to choose a photographer to open a speaker event. We’re not renowned for our words. I spent the last 40 years behind a camera so I didn’t have to speak,” says Duley, who has photographed people surviving hopeless situations in South Sudan, Bangladesh and Ukraine. His powerful images build an intimacy between the subject and the viewer who are separated by many miles, yes, but also by the thinnest threads of circumstance.

Addressing an auditorium with two balconies full of expectant faces, Duley narrates his personal journey from a celebrity photographer who “always wanted to do something more ” to a documentarian with an eye for the forgotten and marginalized.

“When I worked as a music and fashion photographer, I always had the nagging feeling that there was something missing, that I wasn’t using my skills productively,” says Duley. “I gave up photography — I walked away from it completely — and started doing care work. As a care worker, I started looking after a young guy called Nick, who has autism — very severe autism.”

It was in photographing Nick and trying to capture his experience of “living downstairs at a party” that Duley found his voice and mission — to tell untold stories through images.

In this talk, Duley shares the tales of several people he’s photographed in the years since — the Rohingya refugees and a group of street kids in Odessa. Each story is punctuated with his stunning, often heartbreaking, images.

And then comes Duley’s own story, hinted at with the bomb joke made in the first minute of his talk. In 2011, Duley was on patrol with 75th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army in Afghanistan when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED). In that moment, Duley became the person surviving a horrifying circumstance, as someone in the group photographed him on the ground, fighting for life. He survived — but lost both of his legs and his left arm.

“At first, I was devastated by what had happened. I thought my work was over. [Nothing made] sense to me,” says Duley. “It was the stories I’ve documented that inspired me to get through the last year. To survive. To get back up on my new legs and to come tell their stories but also my own … To show that losing your limbs doesn’t end your life.”

Duley’s words will punch anyone in the stomach. But for me, a journalist, they had an extra degree of resonance. Duley’s career took off photographing Oasis, Marilyn Manson and Lenny Kravitz and, like him, I started out at a magazine. (Jane, for those who remember it.) My first interviews were with starlets getting buzz for news movies and bands whose albums were weeks away from release. While I loved these interviews, inevitably a moment would come where they’d say, “People always ask that,” or where I’d read what I thought had been an illuminating anecdote repeated in another interview. These interviews were with people lucky enough to tell their stories — and have the world listen — on repeat.

As a young journalist, I pushed for opportunities to share stories that no one had heard. On occasion, I got the chance to. One of my first big features for the magazine was about a scam that students across the United States were experiencing. These students would see an ad for a small, career-focused college where they’d learn a highly-employable skill like computer programming or electrical engineering. They’d go to visit the school, and find themselves dazzled by the promise of a different life. They’d take out a sizable loan to attend the school. Then one day they’d arrive on campus — often a strip mall — to find that, literally, the school was no longer there. The owner had taken off into the night, and the student was stuck paying off the loan for an education they never received.

I interviewed nearly a dozen people who had experienced this. They came from largely underprivileged backgrounds, and not one of them had ever been interviewed before. Our interviews sprawled for hours, sometimes feeling close to therapy sessions. Some of them had been trying for years to get someone to listen to them and, with no response, they seemed amazed that anyone cared to tell their story. If there’s anything I learned from those conversations — not to mention the rise of Facebook and Twitter — it’s that it is a basic human need to be seen and listened to.

In most of these conversations, there was an understanding that I was a reporter — that I could write and shine a flashlight on the issue, but that there wasn’t much more I could do. Still, one night I got a call from a young woman who was more than $20K in debt. She was crying, in the middle of what sounded like a panic attack. “Please, please help me,” she begged.

I have rarely in life felt that powerless. Every lawyer, loan expert and education department employee I had interviewed for the article thus far had expressed sympathy, but told me that they had little hope that the people I was interviewing would ever be excused from their loans. All I had for them were … words.

In the years since that moment, I haven’t stopped covering difficult stories altogether. But I fully admit that I have shied away from them.

In his talk, Duley tells of going to the border of Burma and Bangladesh, to photograph the refugee camp were the Rohingya people “have been left to rot for 20 years.”

“The people there have been forgotten, so I thought it was important to go and document their stories. I arranged with a village elder that people would come along the next day and I would take portraits of all these people,” says Duley. “I put a white sheet up and started to take photographs. It was still dawn, but there were literally hundreds of people turning up with ailments and diseases — just a hopeless situation … I got in a bit of a panic because these people were coming up to me, desperate. I was trying to explain to the village elder that I was not a doctor and that I couldn’t help these people. He said, ‘This is important. These people know you’re not a doctor. But at least now someone is telling their story.’”

Words, images — visibility. They do matter. They don’t provide physical needs. But they do provide something deeper.

I can’t imagine how overwhelmed Duley must have felt in the camp that morning. A part of the incredible work he’s chosen is, on a regular basis, feeling tremendous sorrow for not being able to wave a magic wand and make things better for people. And yet, he does it anyway. Even after losing three of his limbs, this summer Duley returned to work, photographing the Paralympic Games. As he tells NBC News in this interview, “I’m myself again.”

This talk is truly a must-watch. It’s difficult for me to pinpoint why it didn’t get the views we would have guessed while sitting in that silent editorial meeting months ago. I suspect that this talk got glossed over because it is so difficult, churning up so many layers of empathy without providing an outlet to be able to do something. Or perhaps it comes down to technical reasons. Duley’s talk ran over a weekend — when we’ve noticed that viewers often skip new talks, instead watching talks on a specific subject that resonates with them. Perhaps it’s because the headline — “When a reporter becomes the story” — was moving to members of the editorial team, many of us with journalism backgrounds, but didn’t connect with a broader audience. Your guess is as good as mine.

All I have to say is: watch this talk. Duley crisscrossed the globe, searched his soul and made an unthinakble physical sacrifice to tell these stories. Now it’s your turn to hear them.

Neuroscientist Molly Crockett has a secret to share: if you want to make better decisions, eat a grilled cheese sandwich.

In today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, Crockett shares how she accidentally had a part in circulating this message. Several years ago, Crockett and her fellow researchers set out to study how serotonin would effect reactions when a person felt that they were treated unfairly. They manipulated serotonin in a study by giving participants a beverage designed to deplete the brain of the amino acid tryptophan, which gets converted into serotonin. The study found that, when tryptophan was low, people were more likely to seek revenge when they felt mistreated.

“That’s the study we did. And here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards,” says Crockett, revealing these doozies:

• “A cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision making,” The Hindustan Times (June 6, 2008)
• “Eating cheese and meat may boost self-control,” Discover Magazine (June 6, 2008)
• “Official! Chocolate stops you being grumpy,” The West Australian (June 10, 2008)

“At this point you might be wondering, ‘Did I miss something? Cheese? Chocolate? Where did that come from?’” says Crockett. “I thought the same thing when these things came out, because our study had nothing to do with cheese or chocolate — we gave people a horrible-tasting drink. But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate. And when science says that cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions, well that’s sure to grab people’s attention.”

This kind elision happens all the time as the press reports on neuroscience. From there, manufacturers latch on to overblown claims as they develop new products.

“Neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing,” says Crockett. “Do you want to sell it? Put a brain on it.”

Crockett stresses that neuroscience is advancing quickly and leading to some truly amazing discoveries.

“I am more excited than most people for the potential of neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe make us better and smarter,” says Crockett. “But we’re not there yet … We have to be careful that we don’t let overblown claims detract the resources and attention away from the real science that’s playing a much longer game.”

For a primer on how to spot what Crockett calls “neuro-bunk,” “neuro-bullocks,” or “neuro-flapdoodle,” watch her engaging talk. And below, a selection of headlines that readers should be wary of. Note: Inclusion here doesn’t mean that the science behind a study is bad, or that a news source intentionally overstated a claim. It’s simply that these pieces give conclusive answers to concepts that scientists are only beginning to understand. As Crockett says, “The answers shouldn’t be simple because the brain isn’t simple.”

“You Love Your iPhone. Literally,” The New York Times (Sept. 30, 2011)

In her talk, Crockett debunks this op-ed, about a study in which 16 subjects were shown audio and video of a ringing iPhone while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to map their brain activity. The article notes a “flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion.” Crockett says to be very skeptical of claims that a brain scan can show emotions or thoughts. Yes, there might be activity in the insular cortex — but this region is also associated with memory, language, attention, anger, disgust and pain. Says Crockett, “By the same logic, I could equally conclude, ‘You hate your iPhone.’ When you see activation in the insula, you can’t just pick and choose your favorite explanation off the list.”

“Study: ‘Love hormone’ roused by social media,” Fox News (July 12, 2012)

Oxytocin is often referred to as the “love molecule” or “moral molecule,” because it’s associated with trust, cooperation and bonding. But any articles that refer to it as such should be taken with a grain of salt, says Crockett. According to Crockett, studies on oxytocin “are scientifically valid and they have been replicated, but they’re not the full story.” She explains, “Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy, it increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups.”

“Hormone Oxytocin May Keep Men Faithful,” ABC News (Nov. 14, 2012)

Last month, a flurry of articles appeared based on a study in which male participants were given “a sniff” of oxytocin before being introduced to an “attractive” experimenter. The study found that men in monogamous relationships who received said sniff kept their distance from the researcher. The hormone didn’t appear to have an effect on single men. So what’s the problem with this study circulating in the press? That it is a very big leap to say that oxytocin might “keep men faithful.” Keeping physical distance from an attractive woman in a single situation is hardly a measure of fidelity.

“Neuro boosts minds, moods and more — A drink review,” Lifenut.com (Sept. 26, 2011)

Neuro is a brand of beverages that makes bold claims on its bottles. “Using the power of science, each Neuro enhances the body’s reaction to all the ways you live your life in color,” reads their website, “from providing the spark that ignites your passions and stimulates your mind, to the fuel for your dreams and inner peace.” Naturally, Crockett is skeptical about this brand and, with it, any positive reviews. “When this came up in my local shop, naturally I was curious about some of the research backing these claims. I went to the company’s website looking to find some controlled trials of their products — but I didn’t find any,” says Crockett. “Trial or no trial, these claims are front and center on their products.”

“Brain scans can detect lying,” PreventDisease.com (undated)

This article quotes research that could “put the lie detector machine out of business.” It shares the results of a study in which fMRI was used to scan students’ brains as they were asked to lie and tell the truth in a lab setting. And when they were lying, subjects showed increased brain activity. While this study is interesting, much more research needs to be done before this headline could be considered true. Jumping to this conclusion is dangerous, as the issue of whether to use brain scans as evidence courtrooms is currently being debated.

“Red wine and chocolate can boost your brain power,” The Telegraph (May 6, 2011)

As Crockett notes in her talk, the media flocks to science that says decadent food and beverages have benefits for the brain. The claims are usually overstated — or made through tangential facts — as happened with Crockett’s study that morphed pro-chocolate in the press. In general, headlines like these should always set off warning bells.

Below, a few other recent headlines which have us wary of neuro-bunk:

• “All that stress is shrinking your brain, new study finds,” NBC News (Nov. 26, 2012)
• “Internet pornography can make you lose your memory,” The Independent (Dec. 17, 2012)
• “Go take a hike — it’s good for your brain,” Chicago Tribune (Dec. 19, 2012)
• “Study: Sex can make you smarter,” CBS Local (Sept. 14, 2012)

And some more great reading on the bounds of extrapolating from neuroscience research:

• “Neuroscience Fiction: What neuroscience really teaches us and what it doesn’t,” The New Yorker (Dec. 2, 2012)
• “Winter of Discontent: Is the hot affair between neuroscience and science journalism cooling down?” Knight Science Journalism Tracker (Dec. 3, 2012)

When an earthquake shook Costa Rica in September of 2012, it took 60 seconds for the tremors to travel 250 kilometers north to Managua, Nicaragua. And yet just 30 seconds later, the first message about the earthquake appeared on Twitter.

In today’s talk, filmed at TEDSalon London 2012, Markham Nolan of Storyful.com shares why this represents a major shift in the dynamics of news media.

“As journalists, we interact in real-rime. We’re not in a position where the audience is reacting to news—we’re reacting to the audience,” explains Nolan. “We’re actually relying on them. They’re helping us find the news and they’re helping us figure out what is the best angle to take.”

Every minute, 72 more hours of video are posted to YouTube and, every second, 3500 more photos go up on Facebook. As Nolan shares, “The problem is when you have that much information, you have to find the good stuff—and that can be incredibly difficult.”

This has changed the way journalists must think about their job. Explains Nolan, “It becomes filtering all this stuff … Instead of going and finding the information and brining it back to the reader, you are holding back stuff that is potentially damaging.”

In this fascinating talk, Nolan shares how he and his team weed out doctored photos, determine the veracity of video footage and build rosters of credible Twitter users. To hear real-life examples of how they’ve done this with media created during the Arab Spring, Hurricane Sandy and the conflict in Syria, listen to Nolan’s talk. In it, he shares the hidden clues that Storyful investigators traced in order to parse the credible from the fake.

Below, Nolan reflects on how YouTube is increasingly becoming the place to go for news.

After giving his TED Talk, Nolan took to his personal blog to explain why he believes YouTube will soon overtake traditional news sources. For him, three recent events underscored to him that a major shift is underway. Writes Nolan:

Last Wednesday I told a TED audience of 250 people that the YouTube video platform was becoming the most important repository of documentary evidence about humankind in existence. It’s a bold statement, but I think it stands up.

YouTube is now becoming a real-time window on world events through live streaming. It is already the host of the world’s biggest, most accessible video archive of life on earth – from the mundane to the spectacular. Some of that is real-time documentation, and some of it is retrospective material. And it is growing at a phenomenal rate. By the time my short TED talk ended on Wednesday, there were 864 more hours of video on YouTube than when I started.

Three things this year changed how I view YouTube.

The first epiphany was the Democratic conventions in the US. I wanted to watch the event unadulterated, without commentary, without the partisan hackery or faux-objectivity of the networks. YouTube had a page dedicated to the conventions, where I could browse in and out of the live action as it happened, or, when things became a little dull, review videos from speeches I had missed.

What startled me about my own behaviour was that I hadn’t checked the TV stations to see how they were covering it and subsequently dismissed them, but that I made an innate choice that YouTube would be my first stop. I didn’t even consider Fox or CNN – YouTube was naturally the first place I went to watch the elections. I didn’t reach for the remote, I grabbed the iPad. That was a big shift. YouTube had always been the first place I’d go to for footage in retrospect, but for it to be my instinctive choice for ongoing news, as it was happening – that was HUGE.

Felix Baumgartner’s edge-of-the-atmosphere parachute jump was the second. Eight million people logged on to watch that little hop live via YouTube. News channels couldn’t devote the adequate time to it and would skip in and out, but Red Bull’s YouTube channel streamed the entire thing. The last minutes of the ascent were mesmerising. Joe Kittinger’s halting instructions to Felix in his pod were endearing and highly stressful. I hooked a laptop up to the TV to super-size my YouTubing, and watched the plummet, wondering if TV coverage of live events was on a similar, plunging trajectory.

The third  is the ongoing war in Syria.  Footage from Syria and the Arab Spring in general falls into a different category to most YouTube uploads- it is, arguably, evidentiary material. An entire war, to which external media were NOT welcome, has been documented via the clenched, phone-holding fists of citizens, soldiers and activists. And last week, the UN said that one particular event could, if validated, be considered a war crime. The evidence lay largely on YouTube servers.

We are now the most-chronicled generation in history.  There has never been a greater level of unfiltered documentation of humanity (caveats coming) in history. It also gives us a window into countries that old-school news would never have shown. Through YouTube you get to see past media stereotypes to get candid glimpses from Saudi Arabia, central Russia, caucus states, Pacific islands and elsewhere. It must be said, however, that documentation falls short of being global. Swathes of the planet are not represented for reasons of culture or connectivity. We know, in Storyful, that there are ‘black holes’ for YouTube footage, due to connectivity, etc. Coverage from certain countries in Africa is abysmal. When we’ve gone looking for footage of news events in Congo, Mali or anywhere in the centre of Africa, it’s simply not there. Iraq is a dead zone for YouTube content. On the other hand, I’ve been involved in helping Google curate video from elections in Nigeria, Senegal and currently Ghana, all of which have been very active, and creative, in how they cover news. Given its need for decent upload speeds, a per-country/region comparison of video footage tallies could very well be an interesting benchmark for a global connectivity study.

The problem with YouTube being a gigantic and ever-growing haystack of video is that most people approach it looking for needles, and the means by which you find what you’re looking for haven’t matched the pace of the growth in volume. Organising the stack is crucial to make it navigable, useful, and potentially, to allow it blast a lot of TV into insignificance by making more content accessible to everyone, everywhere. The greater focus on channels, much vaunted of late, will hopefully begin to make this a reality.

How does this relate to the mainstream media? The media houses that recognise that organising YouTube into usable channels early are the ones will thrive. You can already see how some are adapting. Check out the New York Times, with their Timecast videos and wall-to-wall election coverage. See how the Weather Channel delivered non-stop Sandy via YouTube for the duration of the storm & aftermath. And look at the Wall Street Journal which has succeeded in integrating relevant, timely web video reporting seamlessly into what was a traditionalist financial newspaper.

News orgs can’t think of themselves as TV channels, or newspapers (with website) anymore. They have to think of themselves as content generators, connecting with the audience via whatever format people makes sense for them as they go about their daily lives.

The British Parliament elected in 2005 has an unfortunate nickname  — the “Rotten Parliament.”

Journalist Heather Brooke had a lot to do with the uncovering of their rottenness. In 2004, just a few years after the passage of the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, Brooke began requesting documentation on members of Parliament’s expenses, from their travel to their incidentals to their second homes.

“I didn’t set out to revolutionize the British Parliament. That was not my intention. I was just making these requests as research for my first book,” says Brooke in this moving talk from TEDGlobal. (The book is called Your Right to Know: A Citizen’s Guide to the Freedom of Information Act.) “[But] the amount of resistance I got, you would have thought … I was asking for the code to a nuclear bunker.”

It took a multi-year legal battle for Brooke to get the information she requested. And not all of it came through the usual channels. A whistleblower inside Parliament copied much of expense report data onto a disk, and walked out of the building with it, leaking it to The Daily Telegraph. Slews of stories followed, detailing expense abuses from a £12,000 gardening bill to £18,000 bookshelves to payments on a third home. A full-blown scandal erupted.

In the end, six ministers would resign — the Speaker of the House of Commons stepping down for the first time in 300 years. A new government was elected, with 120 members of Parliament opting not to seek re-election. A few of the former members of Parliament even received jail time.

“Access to information used to be quite a niche interest, but it’s gone mainstream,” says Brooke in her talk. “Everyone around the world wants to know what people in power are doing. They want a say in decisions made in their name and with their money.”

In her talk, Brooke highlights a few new tools, which she hopes will make tracking information on those in power much easier. Alaveteli.org aims to take the hassle out of Freedom of Information requests while creating a public database of the information received. Brooke is also a fan of InvestigativeDashboard.org, which streamlines the process of tracking of assets across borders.

To hear more about Brooke’s battle with Parliament, listen to her talk. And after the jump, read an excerpt from her new book, The Revolution Will Be Digitised, which not only tells her story but looks at others — from pro-democracy campaigners to hackers — fighting what she calls “the Information War.”

Brooke’s new book begins:

“We are at an extraordinary moment in human history: never before has the possibility of true democracy been so close to realisation. As the cost of publishing and duplication has dropped to near zero, a truly free press, and a truly informed public, becomes a reality. A new Information Enlightenment is dawning where knowledge flows freely, beyond national boundaries. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency. In this new Enlightenment it isn’t just scientific truths that are the goal, but discovering truths about the way we live, about politics and power.

During the first Enlightenment the free flow of information was considered essential to understanding the natural world; without full disclosure we had no hope of overcoming our inherent human biases that occluded our vision of the truth. In England, scientists were careful to cordon off this questing curiosity to science but its revolutionary impact in politics led to the American and French revolutions. Thomas Jefferson said that America was an experiment that would ‘demonstrate to the world the falsehood that freedom of [speech and] the press are incompatible with orderly government’. America produced ‘the first legislature that had the courage to declare that its citizens may be trusted with the formation of their own opinions’.

This aspiration is not solely American. Citizens around the world have long declared a desire to be trusted with the formation of their own opinions, and that can only come when they have access to the facts. This is the essence of the information war. Do we trust citizens to communicate freely and come to their own conclusions, or do we believe those in authority have a right to restrict and manipulate what we know? Do we hold to Enlightenment ideals of reason and the pursuit of truth no matter where that takes us, or put our faith in authority to make certain an uncertain world?

…

The Internet is powerful because it allows people to organise around issues at unprecedented speed, broadcast their thoughts and challenge those in charge. A wave of such groups banded together in early 2011 to demand the removal of authoritarian leaders in the Middle East as one country after another rose up with varying degrees of success. But the Internet doesn’t cause revolution. It is a communications network. What people choose to do with technology – that is where we can make moral judgements. Some people will use it for ill, others for good. Security forces tend to focus on the ills, while the majority use it for good. In the name of protecting us from ‘bad things on the Internet’ there are increasing moves to suppress communications networks in both repressive and democratic countries. Demands to shut down, censor, filter or in other ways oversee and control the way people communicate are on the rise.”

To read the rest of this excerpt, head to TheRevolutionWillBeDigitised.com.

Levitt spoke at TED2004 offering a preview of a chapter of "Freakonomics" titled "Why do crack dealers still live with their moms?" (watch the video) and exposing his very unconventional approach to economic analysis.

The migration of the blog wouldn’t be a remarkable event (even though the blog is very interesting and highly interactive, attracting hundreds of readers’ comments) were it not for two facts. The move, in a way, closes a circle: "Freakonomics" was born from a profile that Dubner wrote about Levitt for the New York Times Magazine in 2003, "The Economist of Odd Questions". It also underscores a nascent trend, that of well-known bloggers moving into newspapers’ and magazines’ websites, creating synergies and pooling readerships — another step towards the hybridization of the media. The NYT is not the first to try this strategy: France’s Le Monde, for example, has been doing so for a while.