The gunfire causes Brian Conley, a 30-year old American journalist, to pause our conversation. “Sorry,” he says on the phone from from Benghazi, the embattled capitol of Libya’s rebels, “there was some shooting.”

But Conley isn’t there to report on whatever confrontation just occurred. He and his colleague, Brooklyn’s Louis Adelman, have spent the past week in Benghazi training Libyans how to document the increasingly fragile Libyan uprising of 2011 themselves. “It’s going to be bad if the international community has not done something soon,” he says, “and the media’s all left.”

Conley’s the director of Small World News, a new media company funded entirely by donations that conducts citizen media training in some of the world’s most dangerous places. Through his Alive.In series of websites, Small World News has created and curated video from citizens’ perspectives in Iraq, Gaza, Iran and Mexico. When Libyans began their push to uproot dictator Moammar Gahdafi last month, Conley worked the phones to make local contacts, flew to Egypt, and made the hours-long drive from Alexandria to the Libyan border before arriving in Benghazi on March 11, Kodak videocameras in his luggage.

“It’s totally directed by locals,” Conley says with pride, “with the aim being to report to the international community.” In some of Small World News’ previous efforts, the camerawork was shaky or the video footage wasn’t well contextualized, making it difficult for outsiders to understand the messages conveyed. But in Benghazi, Conley and Adelman have trained about a dozen Libyans how to conduct interviews and produce videos with professional-grade quality, even if they’re shot with equipment as rudimentary as a cellphone camera.

The results speak for themselves. So far, Benghazi’s citizen journalists have shot between 20 and 30 videos, Conley estimates. On Alive.in/Libya, teachers talk about the lack of economic opportunities for their students. Rebels mock Gadhafi’s rambling speeches. Opposition figures urge “freedom-loving” Americans to pressure the Obama administration to stop Gadhafi’s aircraft from attacking them. Translation to English is crowdsourced, thanks to Small World News’ Twitter followers, and posted on the videos using Universal Subtitles.

Social media, in fact, infuses the whole project. Conley provides Libyans with Speak2Tweet numbers where they can record audio files and blast them to the world over Twitter. His website also has aggregated and curated lots of other Libyan videos that Small World News’ trainees didn’t shoot. And some videos — like the one atop the post — are direct responses to questions asked by people around the world through the #AskALibyan hashtag.

But it’s getting tense. Gadhafi’s forces are besieging Ajdabiya, a rebel-held city of 170,000 that’s the last line of defense before Benghazi. The rebels’ transitional government hasn’t always been the most hospitable to Small World News’ deputized journalists, as “people are quick to assume these Libyan kids are Gadhafi’s forces or spies,” Conley says. Outside the compound where Conley’s staying, he can see “plumes of smoke” in the wake of “three explosions.”

As we talk, he tweets that he thinks Gadhafi’s planes might have been shot down by rebels, causing the big booms he heard. Over the phone, I can hear some of Small World News’ Libyan journalists express excitement to shoot footage of whatever conflagration is underway. Conley advises them that it’s not safe enough. “There’s clear violence that’s happening here,” he says.

Indeed, it’s not safe for anyone in Benghazi right now. Conley says he’s considering leaving the city in the next 24 hours. His hope is that the media training he set up for the Libyans lets them continue to get their stories out to the world — even if the world hasn’t come to the aid of the uprising. The United Nations Security Council may vote on Thursday on a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya.

“The guys we met, they were already talking about how to get documentaries out,” Conley says. “The want to show Libya’s a progressive, advanced country. They don’t live in tents, they don’t want Gadhafi, and they want to clarify their message about why they don’t want Gadhafi.”