This appeared in Columbia Journalism Review magazine.

By Alice Su

When Hazm al-Mazouni shows his press pass at the entrance to the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp in the Jordanian desert, the guards don’t let him in. A 42-year-old native of Hama, Syria, Al-Mazouni’s status in Jordan is clear: refugee. But the guards are wary of his Radio al-Balad badge. “This is proof that we did something,” Al-Mazouni says, smiling. “A good thing.”

Al-Mazouni has been a refugee for 11 months and a journalist for seven. He wears brown, horn-rimmed glasses and walks briskly, a laptop bag hanging from his shoulder and two cell phones in hand, one for personal calls, the other for work. Zaatari administrators are well aware of his reporting for Syrians Among Us, a radio news program and online bulletin produced by Syrian refugees.

The program began as pilot project in October 2012 by the Community Media Network(CMN), a Jordanian nonprofit that supports independent media in the Arab world. CMN’s funding comes largely from Western foundations, notably the Open Society Foundations, UNESCO, and the National Endowment for Democracy. A US State Department grant of $77,000 paid for the first phase of Syrians Among Us.

The program is the brainchild of CMN director general Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian-American journalist and media activist who has been working to expand press freedom in the Middle East for more than a decade. “Our goal is to give people their own voice, outside of the mainstream powers that be that control our voices,” Kuttab says.

In 2000, he started an internet radio operation called AmmanNet. From the beginning, Kuttab preferred to hire independent-minded amateurs rather than conventionally trained professionals. “I didn’t want reporters with bad habits like self-censorship,” he says. “I trained young people, critical-thinking people, who were never journalists.”

The six-month Syrians Among Us pilot project trained refugees to cover their own communities and use journalism to improve refugees’ day-to-day lives. CMN selected 33 Syrian men and women for training, with the sole criteria being prior experience in media activism. Most were revolutionaries who had been fighting against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. All were unemployed.

The trainees attended two sessions in basic journalism tactics and ethics. Hamza al-Soud, CMN’s project development manager who led some of the training, says objectivity was the hardest concept to teach. “Many of the trainees’ first stories referred to Bashar al-Assad as ‘the evil dictator’ and ‘the criminal,’” he says. They adopted more neutral language only after “some very hard discussions.”

The pilot produced 120 news broadcasts. Meanwhile, the number of Syrian refugees in Jordan increased from about 87,000 when the program began to some 520,000 in September of this year.

Western media coverage of the refugees tends to ignore the more mundane struggles of daily life. “The only news they write is numbers,” Al-Mazouni says. “How many people are killed, how many houses destroyed. They don’t talk about the refugees’ lives, their situation, their needs.” Jordanian media, not surprisingly, dwell on how Syrian refugees affect Jordan.

By early September, unemployment, rising prices, and a water shortage inside Jordan were causing tension between Jordanians and the refugees. Etaf Roudan, a co-producer of Syrians Among Us, suggested that Jordanian frustration is actually with their government’s mishandling of the situation, not with the refugees themselves. “They take money from the UN and Arab world, but they didn’t make good conditions for the Jordanians or the Syrians,” says Roudan, a native of Mafraq, which is only a few miles from the Zaatari tent city. “In Mafraq we had 47,000 Jordanians and problems with water, pollution, and employment. When Zaatari comes with 122,000 refugees, there are no jobs, no water, just disaster.”

By Alice Su

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