On January 14th those protesters forced Zein al Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s dictator for the previous quarter-century, from office. What followed was not easy. Terrorism hindered both economic progress and deeper political reform. But in 2015 the country became the first Arab state ever to be judged fully “free” by Freedom House, an American monitor of civil liberties, and it moved up a record 32 places among countries vetted by the Vienna-based Democracy Ranking Association. In December Ms Mathlouthi sang before another spellbound audience—this time in Oslo, as part of celebrations surrounding the award of the Nobel peace prize to four civil-society groups that shepherded in the new constitution of 2014.
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Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197
The first time I called Umberto Eco, he was sitting at his desk in his seventeenth-century manor in the hills outside Urbino, near the Adriatic coast of Italy. He sang the virtues of his bellissima swimming pool, but suspected I might have trouble negotiating the region’s tortuous mountain passes. So we agreed instead to meet at his apartment in Milan. I arrived there last August on ferragosto, the high point of summer and the day the Catholic Church celebrates the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Milan’s gray buildings gleamed with heat, and a thin layer of dust had settled on the pavement. Hardly an engine could be heard. As I stepped into Eco’s building, I took a turn-of-the-century lift and heard the creaking of a door on the top floor. Eco’s imposing figure appeared behind the lift’s wrought-iron grating. “Ahhh,” he said with a slight scowl.
The apartment is a labyrinth of corridors lined with bookcases that reach all the way up to extraordinarily high ceilings—thirty thousand volumes, said Eco, with another twenty thousand at his manor. I saw scientific treatises by Ptolemy and novels by Calvino, critical studies of Saussure and Joyce, entire sections devoted to medieval history and arcane manuscripts. The library feels alive, as many of the books seem worn from heavy use; Eco reads at great speed and has a prodigious memory. In his study, a maze of shelves contains Eco’s own complete works in all their translations (Arabic, Finnish, Japanese . . . I lost count after more than thirty languages). Eco pointed at his books with amorous precision, attracting my attention to volume after volume, from his early landmark work of critical theory,The Open Work, to his most recent opus, On Ugliness.
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Don’t Turn Away From the Art of Life
In a letter written in 1871, the Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud uttered a phrase that announces the modern age: “Je’ est un autre” (“’I’ is someone else”). Some 69 years later I entered the world as an identical twin, and Rmbaud’s claim has an uncanny truth for me, since I grew up being one of a pair. Even though our friends and family could easily tell us apart, most people could not, and I began life with a blurrier, more fluid sense of my contours than most other folks.
My brother and I live in different cities, but I have never lost my conviction that one’s outward form – the shape of people, but also of surfaces and things – may not be what it seems.
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Investigative journalism’s new outlet
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The two uniformed jail guards argued angrily, cursed each other, then erupted into a nasty brawl with punches and furniture and bodies flying. As the fight ended and the guards skulked away to lick their wounds, a breathless audience of about 100 people looked on.
The violent eruption wasn’t in a jail. It was on the stage of The Living Room theater in Kansas City, and it was the latest example of an innovative new approach to investigative journalism: put a controversial story on stage and dramatize it for audiences who might not otherwise be aware of the issues at stake and the discoveries made by traditional news media.
The Kansas City production, “Justice in the Embers,” is the latest example of the collaboration called “StoryWorks,” launched by the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting, a non-profit journalistic organization, and the Bay Area’s Tides Theater group. The ways of investigative journalism have changed little since the days of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell — a reporter works and digs and writes a story for months or years, then publishes or broadcasts it and…hopes for the best. Hopes that the public, or the government, is moved or outraged enough to take action. And if not, the story settles quietly into the archives. Though multi-media techniques have improved the presentation of investigative stories, they still reach mostly an audience of dedicated news consumers, and rarely much more.
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50 blogs by journalists, for journalists 2016
This is a list of blogs by journalists, journalism academics and photo-journalists sharing tips and perspectives on topics such as social media, data journalism, apps, tools, and the latest developments in the industry.
The blogs are listed in random order and we have not included any blogs hosted by news organisations or other sites.
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Longform Visual Storytelling Blog
Storybench and Northeastern’s Media Innovation program are proud to announce that we’re launching a new longform visual storytelling site. Today, Ochre passes from its previous owners Blue Chalk Media, a digital media company based in Brooklyn, to the Media Innovation program, a new graduate program in digital journalism at Northeastern University.
Ochre’s first story edited by the Media Innovation program is about The Boat, an interactive graphic novel published by SBS Australia that tells the fictional story of Mai, a 16-year-old girl whose desperate parents decide to send her to Australia by boat to save her from conflict. On Ochre, Media Innovation student Yingchi Wei dissects the digital techniques and aesthetics used to create The Boat.
The Media Innovation program and Storybench editors will oversee the production and editing of stories for Ochre, which is designed as a gathering point for reflecting and highlighting the changes in today’s visual storytelling landscape.
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Le Guin Steers Her Craft Into a New Century
Ursula Le Guin has brought mainstream recognition to science fiction in a successful career that has endured for sixty years, with books that include The Left Hand of Darkness, Lavinia, and the Earthsea series for young readers.
She says she doesn’t believe in a lot of do’s and don’ts in writing. But she does run writing workshops in which serious writers might test what works well, and what doesn’t quite do the job. Back in the ’90s, Le Guin wrote a manual for aspiring writers called Steering the Craft. And she’s just released a new edition of the book, updated for the 21st century.
Le Guin tells NPR’s Scott Simon that sound is often forgotten in a piece of writing. “Writing is a kind of way of speaking, and I hear it,” she says. “And I think a lot of readers hear it too. Even if they hear it in silence. And so the sounds of the language, and the rhythm and the cadence of the sentences are very powerful.”
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Doc Chronicles Innovative Life in Camp
The nation of Jordan estimates that it has taken in about 1.4 million Syrian refugees since the fighting in Syria began in 2011. While the United Nations runs refugee camps there, many Syrians live in towns and cities where they do not have permission to work.
A new documentary, “Salam Neighbor,” looks at how Syrians are making a living in the Zaatari refugee camp and surrounding areas. One of them is Ghassoun, a mother of three and a nurse. She cannot find a job because she lacks a work visa and childcare. Instead, she sews trinkets for women who wear hijabs. That income helps her pay rent and working from home lets her look after her children.
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Saudi Arabian Women Are ‘Pushing Normal’
I first saw Saudi Arabian women “pushing normal” before I knew this concept had a name. I was walking down Tahlia Street in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. It’s a trendy weekend hangout spot, a strip of fast food burger and brand name coffee shops popular with young Saudi men.
It was striking to see three young women stride down this all-male domain defying the kingdom’s conservative social codes enforced by the religious police and the judgments of family and neighbors.
“But if we listen to them, stay home, and not enjoy our lives, it’s going to be like this forever,” says Sadeem, age 17. Her friends, Amira, 18, and Yasmin, 16, nod in agreement, though none reveal their last names.
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Arab Art Redefined
Sultan Sooud Al‑Qassemi knows media.
When the Arab Spring started sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi became a go-to source for live updates on social media. An occasional columnist with 375,000 followers on Twitter, he is now a public figure and activist. Art has become his big agenda. Eventually, he explains, his interest in breaking news had died down and he shifted his attention to collecting and promoting modern and contemporary art from the Arab world. He sees it as a continuation of the ideals of the Arab Spring, he says, because the art tends to be political — and it defies traditional definitions set by the West. Qassemi actively promotes the Barjeel Art Foundation, which he founded in 2010. It contains more than 1,000 works of art that he has collected. He has buying power because he also happens to be a member of one of the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates — though he’d rather talk about art than his family history. He stopped by NPR’s New York City bureau to do that.
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‘I was terribly wrong’ – writers on Arab spring
Five years ago the Guardian asked me to evaluate the effects of the Tunisian uprising on the rest of the Arab world, and specifically Syria. I recognised the country was “by no means exempt from the pan-Arab crisis of unemployment, low wages and the stifling of civil society”, but nevertheless argued that “in the short to medium term, it seems highly unlikely that the Syrian regime will face a Tunisia-style challenge”.
That was published on 28 January 2011. On the same day a Syrian called Hasan Ali Akleh set himself alight in protest against the Assad regime in imitation of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia. Akleh’s act went largely unremarked, but on 17 February tradesmen at Hareeqa in Damascus responded to police brutality by gathering in their thousands to chant “The Syrian people won’t be humiliated”. This was unprecedented. Soon afterwards, the Deraa schoolboys were arrested and tortured for writing anti-regime graffiti. When their relatives protested on 18 March, and at least four were killed, the spiralling cycle of funerals, protests and gunfire was unleashed. In 2011, I wrote that Assad personally was popular, and so he remained until his 30 March speech to the ill-named People’s Assembly. Very many had suspended judgment until that moment, expecting an apology for the killings and an announcement of serious reforms. Instead, Assad threatened, indulged in conspiracy theories, and, worse, giggled repeatedly.
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Passing of Leila Alaoui: Celebrating her work
“The Moroccans” is a series of life-sized photographic portraits shot in a mobile studio transported around Morocco. Tapping into my Moroccan heritage, I spent time staying with different communities to create photographs from the perspective of the participant observer, aiming for a more informed angle than an external documentarian might take. Rather than being objective, the series adopts the subjectivity of my own position as both an insider and native Moroccan, and simultaneously an outsider as the critically informed documentarian. This hybrid position echoes the postcolonial correction that globally conscious contemporary artists are now mounting worldwide to counterpoint the tired exoticization of North Africa and the Arab region by Euro-American artists through history.
The photographer Leila Alaoui has died on 18 January 2016 aged 33 of a heart attack after being shot in terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
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The Man Who Helped Trigger Arab Spring
Hosni Kaliya pulls a cigarette out of his pack with his mouth. When he poured gasoline on his body and set himself on fire, most of his right hand was consumed by the flames and all that remains is a stump without fingers. He still has four fingers on his left hand, but they jut out like claws, burned, stiff and contorted. His fingernails are curled. He wears black wool gloves with the fingertips cut off, so that they won’t dangle emptily. A knit cap protects Kaliya’s head, where his hair was burned off, and his unusually small ears. But the disfigured face, the work of doctors using old and new skin, how could he hide that?
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History of comics drawn by women
This week the largest comics festival in France announced its 30 nominees for what many consider the most prestigious prize in comics, the Grand Prix. Not one nominee was a woman.
Usually there are at least few women on the longlist for the Angoulême International Comics Festival (known in French as the Festival international de la bande dessinée or FIBD). Last year’s list included only Marjane Sartrapi. In fact, in the festival’s 43-year history, there has only been one female Grand Prix winner: Florence Cestac, who got the prize in 2000. But this year, there was a swift reaction.
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Bowie’s last release ‘parting gift’
David Bowie’s final record was a carefully-orchestrated farewell to his fans, his producer has confirmed. Lazarus, released on the Bowie’s 69th birthday just two days before his death, opens with the lyrics: “Look up here, I’m in Heaven!”
...Its video, which will be viewed in a very different light by millions of fans today, features the musician in a hospital bed, and finishes with him retreating in to a dark closet.
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Patterson donates £10K to flood-hit bookshops
The American thriller writer James Patterson has taken time out from dreaming up bloody ends for a series of characters to donate £10,000 to two flooded English bookshops.
Kate Claughan, The Book Case’s owner, thanks “the great man” Patterson for the donation, while The New Bookshop tweeted that the £5,000 will mean it “can make our kids’ book section very special again when we reopen later this year”.
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HuffPo & Upworthy Downsize
Layoffs hit both media companies as they try to keep up with the evolution of video.
As the world of online and mobile video continues to fragment, the shifting landscape is requiring media companies to be more nimble to keep up. That has led to a series of layoffs and restructurings at several media outlets, including The Huffington Post and Upworthy.
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, whose company is owned by AOL (which was itself acquired by Verizon last year), sent out a memo to employees on Friday saying the company is shifting its approach to video.
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The Road to Syria
The civil war in Syria was a powder keg when the Russians intervened in September. They put up an airbase and started bombing targets there. Russian President Vladimir Putin said the airstrikes were aimed at fighting Islamic terrorism, but it quickly became apparent that the majority of the bombs were aimed, not at ISIS, but at other Syrian insurgent groups fighting the regime of Russia’s ally, President Bashar al-Assad. Whatever their motives, the Russians have inserted themselves into the Syrian conflict and any discussion of how it might end.
A few months ago, 60 Minutes reported from the American base in Qatar, the command center for U.S. operations in the Middle East. We wanted to see the Russian base. So we asked and they agreed. We set out on the road to Syria — which took us on a detour we didn’t expect.
To get to the Russian airbase in Latakia, Syria, you have to start here in Moscow.
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The Arab winter
“I AM the free and fearless. I am secrets that never die. I am the voice of those who will not bow…” The voice in question, raised in song amid the crowds packing Avenue Bourguiba, a promenade in Tunis, at the beginning of 2011, was that of Emel Mathlouthi. For a moment of calm in a month of clamour, she gave voice to the aspirations of hundreds of thousands of her compatriots.
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NY Public Library Digital Collection
This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
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Refugees in Germany launch paper
When Ramy Alasheq was searching last year for a title to give to a newspaper he was helping launch for Arabic-speaking refugees in Germany, the inspiration came from his own journey.
A Syrian-Palestinian refugee, journalist, poet and activist who has asylum in the European nation, Alasheq was at the time at his home in Cologne with his host family.
“They are great and friendly, they give me a lot of love,” he told Al Jazeera. “Once, I thanked Cristina, the mother and wife of the family, for everything. She said, ‘Don’t thank me. I just opened the door’.”
The newspaper, he thought, should be called “Abwab”, Arabic for doors.
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In Tunis, a new home for comics
When it comes to Arab comics, Tunisian graphic designer and comics artist Othman Selmi (born in 1977) is an invaluable guide, with his home-studio being a carnival for urban cultural production enthusiasts. Among French and Arabic books on literature and movies, I see collections of old comics from the Arab world, filling the shelves of a large bookcase covering an entire wall. This is where you find the first issues of Majid, a magazine for children that was established in 1979 in Abu Dhabi and still enjoys circulation in the Arab world. Plus stunning glimpses into the rich imaginative life of the Egyptian cartoonist and visual designer Mohieddine Ellabbad and of the Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat. I also notice stories from Tunisia by Moncef Elkateb or the style of Chedly Belkamsa when drawing in the popular children magazine Qaws Quzah (Rainbow), the first founded in Tunisia in 1984 by a private editor.
Holding a degree from the Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts in Tunis, Othman Selmi has been enjoying some popularity abroad for his editorial illustrations, and was asked by the Italian weekly Internazionale to recount the Tunisian spring in a series of cartoline (literally postcards) using the comics medium.
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How Refugees Find Jobs in Germany
On a recent blustery Sunday, I joined a tour group huddled by a schoolyard fence in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. A gust of wind pushed dead leaves across the basketball court as Ali, a Sudanese refugee, blew into his hands. He was showing us the Gerhart-Hauptmann School, an abandoned edifice from whose rooftop he had threatened to jump when, last summer, police tried to evict six hundred refugees who were living there. Ali continues to live at the school with twenty-three others; together with Mo, a guide from Somalia who was among the hundreds relocated from the school to a camp outside the city, he explained that the eviction effort had lasted more than nine days, involving more than seventeen hundred police officers and costing the city five million euros.
About a dozen of us were present outside the school, attracting uneasy glances from the security guards posted just inside the locked gate. We were participating in the inaugural outing of Refugee Voices, a donation-based “solidarity tour” that allows sympathetic locals and tourists a peek at Berlin’s subculture of asylum seekers and their allies. Other stops on our tour included Oranienplatz, a nearby square famous for activist gatherings, and Görlitzer Park, where young African refugees hang out and sell baggies of marijuana—for many newcomers the only work on offer. At each location, Ali and Mo shared stories of activism, police harassment, and efforts to study and find work. (All of the asylum seekers in this story asked to be identified only by their first names.)
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‘Belgravia’ Treads New Digital Ground
There are few literary mediums that Julian Fellowes has not dabbled in.
Mr. Fellowes, the creator of the hit historical British melodrama “Downton Abbey,” has worked on screenplays, stage plays, novels and a children’s book. He wrote the book for “School of Rock,” a raucous new Broadway musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted from the 2003 Richard Linklater movie, and he is working on his new NBC series “The Gilded Age,” set in New York in late 19th century.
Now, for his next project, “Belgravia,” Mr. Fellowes is marrying an old narrative form – the serialized novel, in the tradition of Charles Dickens’s “The Pickwick Papers” – with the latest digital delivery system: an app.
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Navigating new world of eyewitness media
Of all the major news events over 2015 it’s hard to think of one which didn’t feature footage captured by a member of the public. The age of eyewitness media, where anyone with a smartphone and social media account can take the place of professional camera person, has turned breaking news on its head and news organisations are still figuring out how to deal with this explosion in newsworthy material.
Issues of social news gathering, verification, ethics and hoaxes are causing headaches in newsrooms around the world, so to see out the year we spoke to a range of experts about their opinion on the shifting landscape.
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Editors’ Role Has Changed Over Time
When Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was published earlier this year, readers learned that this much anticipated “second book” by Lee was actually a first draft of what would later become the beloved To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee radically revised this early version of the book on the advice of her editor, Tay Hohoff. That made us wonder: How much do editors shape the final book we read?
On hearing the news about the role Lee’s editor played in the creation of To Kill a Mockingbird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg was surprised at first. The story immediately made him think of legendary editor Max Perkins — who shepherded the works of such greats as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. Berg, who wrote a biography of Perkins, says Perkins had a huge influence on the editors who came after him because of the way he worked with his authors.
“Not only did he change the course of the American literary river, but he changed what editors do by becoming their best friends, their money lenders, their marriage counselors, their psychoanalysts,” Berg says. “And along the way he began offering them titles. He often provided structure for what their novels ought to be. He often gave them whole ideas for what their next book should be.”
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