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Journo crowdfunding campaigns
In the past, we’ve called them The Big 3.
They hold the distinction of being, as far as we can discern, the only crowdfunding campaigns to raise more than a million euros in seed money for news startups in the history of journalism.
Editors of the Dutch, German and Spanish news startups spoke within a couple days of each other this spring to talk about what worked and led their campaigns to such a potent reaction.
For obvious reasons, we wrote about each of them. Here are some of the things all three crowdfunding campaigns had in common.
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Carney to revolutionize freelance journalism
Scott Carney wants to completely change freelance journalism and writing, but before we talk about how, let’s look at why he decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign.
It’s not about the money. He doesn’t even think crowdfunding is the best way to raise money for his idea.
“Crowdfunding is not about the money. It’s about the audience, and knowing that the audience is invested in it, to some degree,” he said. “I wanted to have that inbuilt community first so that I know that I have active participants so that going into building it I know it’s going to be a success.”
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Following in the footsteps of migrants
Hoppers Way in Singleton, Kent, is a quiet suburban cul-de-sac of red-brick detached houses, each with its own garage and driveway. Parked outside No 8, there is often a large white-and-grey camper van – a luxury Swift Kon-tiki 679 model, with a double bed in the back and another over the cab. Singleton is a suburb of Ashford, the last big town on the M20 as it approaches the Channel Tunnel entrance at Folkestone and a stopping point for Eurostar train services between London and the Continent. That makes it a convenient location for the rental business run by Teresa and Stephen Tyrer, who hire out the motorhome for £1,000 a week to people wishing to travel to Europe.
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Once Upon a Time in the Middle East
There was one day near the end, when I took a taxi up a hill, to see a man. We sliced through canyons, making our way into the mountains north of Beirut, riding a black strip of asphalt upon which no lines were drawn. The span of tar was sometimes wide enough for two cars, sometimes one. We drove fast, nearly hitting someone when the road narrowed, nearly hit by another car ourselves when we bisected a second road—no stop signs, no stoplight—and then I realized: Nowhere at any point had a sign indicated a sharp curve or steep drop-off. We were on our own. When we finally stopped, four black dogs came running.
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Teach Yourself Italian
Exile
My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.
Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs mainly to Italy, and I live on another continent, where one does not readily encounter it.
I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic outpost, surrounded by alien sounds.
I think of my mother, who writes poems in Bengali, in America. Almost fifty years after moving there, she can’t find a book written in her language.
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IS recruitment lure Jordanian woman
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — A Jordanian woman who came close to joining the Islamic State group described a sophisticated 14-month recruitment process by the extremists that she said landed her in a secret IS compound in Turkey with dozens of other women.
The 25-year-old was eventually persuaded by Jordanian lawmaker Mazen Dalaeen — who earlier this year failed to extract his own son from the grip of IS recruiters — to return to her family.
The case highlights the systematic grooming of potential IS recruits through daily social media exchanges and follow-up on the ground for travel arrangements — in her case an enveloped stuffed with cash for a plane ticket to Turkey, handed to her by a veiled woman in her home district of Karak in central Jordan.
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Syria: Impact Of Death Of Zahran Alloush
Rebel sources report that a missile hit a gathering of Islam Army leaders in the Eastern Ghouta region Friday, killing several of them, including Mohammed Zahran Alloush. Some reports also say that an allied rebel faction, Feilaq al-Rahman, had much of its leadership wiped out, and that the strike was carried out by Russia. (The Syrian government claims that its own airforce was behind the attack.)
This is big news and it has the potential to shift the balance of power in the Ghouta, a region of suburbs and agricultural towns into that rings the Syrian capital. It could also impact the Syrian peace process—such as it is—that is slated to begin this January.
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Hotz taking on Google & Tesla by Himself
A few days before Thanksgiving, George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker, invites me to his house in San Francisco to check out a project he’s been working on. He says it’s a self-driving car that he had built in about a month. The claim seems absurd. But when I turn up that morning, in his garage there’s a white 2016 Acura ILX outfitted with a laser-based radar (lidar) system on the roof and a camera mounted near the rearview mirror. A tangle of electronics is attached to a wooden board where the glove compartment used to be, a joystick protrudes where you’d usually find a gearshift, and a 21.5-inch screen is attached to the center of the dash. “Tesla only has a 17-inch screen,” Hotz says.
He’s been keeping the project to himself and is dying to show it off. We pace around the car going over the technology. Hotz fires up the vehicle’s computer, which runs a version of the Linux operating system, and strings of numbers fill the screen. When he turns the wheel or puts the blinker on, a few numbers change, demonstrating that he’s tapped into the Acura’s internal controls.
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Six Companies and One Worker: Herself
One afternoon in early 2014, an employee of the Manhattan co-working space Coworkrs got behind the handlebars of a large tricycle and began pedaling it through the Flatiron district. The tricycle was outfitted with a small desk; the employee seemed to be sitting at her desk while cycling around the city.
A company called Peddler Pop-Ups had designed the display and rented out the tricycle for use as a rolling advertisement. (The tricycles can also be used as pop-up stores.) Peddler Pop-Ups is one of six companies founded and operated by a 27-year-old entrepreneur named Danielle Baskin. She does not have any employees, and until this month, Ms. Baskin’s businesses had their headquarters in a 160-square-foot live-work space in the East Village.
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Interview with Simone de Beauvoir
There are many things to be learned from Studs’s 1960 interview with Simone de Beauvoir in her Paris apartment, but perhaps one of the most charming bits of trivia, is that even a philosopher and feminist icon like Simone de Beauvoir made up silly quizzes with her girlfriends when she was sixteen. Only this silly quiz had a profound result, it was one of the first moments Beauvoir realized writing was her destiny.
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Axel Springer Reboots for the Digital Age
BERLIN – When Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, and a handful of his top managers first set their sights on the United States three years ago, it was with notebooks in hand, rather than checkbooks.
A decade after taking the helm in 2002, Mr. Döpfner had already made significant strides in revamping Germany’s largest print publishing group for the digital age. The combined online audience of its flagship newspapers, Bild and Die Welt, had become one of the largest in Europe, and the group was investing heavily in digital companies, which were generating an increasing share of revenues profits.
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The Best Photo Books of 2015
Writing about photography, reading about photography and thinking about how to take photographs are seamless activities for me. They inform one another in ways I can’t fully separate. A great photo book, even more than an exhibition, is where these things all come together. A photo book costs a lot of money to make and is unlikely to sell very many copies. But it is as essential a part of the culture as a good jazz album or a book of poems; and it possibly has as dedicated and fractious an audience as those modestly popular genres. There’s still such consolation and excitement in the swish of paper and the smell of ink, in the fact of stitching and the solidity of a hardcover. I didn’t acquire too many photo books this year — only about a hundred, all told — but I made an effort to seek out a wide variety. These are eight I particularly liked.
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The Lives They Lived: QUEEN FAWZIA
From princess to empress to a royal forgotten amid Egypt’s transformations.
In 1939, when Princess Fawzia of Egypt married the crown prince of Iran, Mohammed Reza, the teenagers united two great Muslim lands. Each side had political and personal motives for welcoming the union: for the Egyptian King Farouk, the princess’s brother, the marriage asserted a constitutional monarch’s power in a region lorded over by the British. For the shah of Iran, formerly an ordinary soldier, the century-old Egyptian royal family conferred aristocratic legitimacy on his own. At the wedding in Cairo, guests received bonbon boxes made of gold and precious stones; flower-filled floats paraded down the wide avenues; fireworks were set off over the Nile.
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Future of Local Investigative Reporting
This is the first of two parts exploring the threatened state of local investigative reporting.
In the recently released movie, “Spotlight,” an investigative reporter for The Boston Globe, Sacha Pfeiffer, grinds away at her job. She gets doors slammed in her face in working-class neighborhoods, she cajoles sources in coffee shops, and she pores over phone directories until the library lights are about to dim.
Her colleagues on the Globe’s investigative team, known as Spotlight, put in their own long hours. The reporter Michael Rezendes (played with manic, twitchy verve by Mark Ruffalo) hangs around courthouses and lawyer’s offices, digging out information through sheer persistence.
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The Graphic Memoir Comes to Turkey
At long last, modern Turkey has been depicted in comic book form.
The work has a modest title, Dare to Disappoint, but its ambitions are large. Its creator, Özge Samancı, has produced a Künstlerroman that also recreates life in Turkey in the 1980s and early 90s, a time when the country’s secular heritage was enforced with a severity that has come under scrutiny in the era of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Here in Turkey, where her book is topping bestseller lists, Samancı has become the year’s most inspiring figure among comic artists, and a subject of intrigue for Turkish magazines, newspapers, and budding artists.... -
‘The New Odyssey’ by Patrick Kingsley
Europe is facing a wave of migration unmatched since the end of World War II – and no one has reported on this crisis in more depth or breadth than the Guardian’s migration correspondent, Patrick Kingsley. Throughout 2015, Kingsley travelled to 17 countries along the migrant trail, meeting hundreds of refugees making epic odysseys across deserts, seas and mountains to reach the holy grail of Europe. The New Odyssey: The Story of the European Refugee Crisis is Kingsley’s unparalleled account of who these voyagers are. It’s about why they keep coming, and how they do it. It’s about the smugglers who help them on their way, and the coastguards who rescue them at the other end. The volunteers that feed them, the hoteliers that house them, and the border guards trying to keep them out. And the politicians looking the other way.
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HP connects freelancers, fixers and editors
It’s more difficult than ever for U.S. media organizations to cover international events. Since 2003, the number of foreign correspondents working for U.S. outlets has fallen 24 percent. Yet as press freedom continues to decline around the world, the need for major news outlets to sustain a presence abroad is more vital than ever.
That’s why a team of journalists and developers recently launched HackPack, a platform to connect freelancers and fixers worldwide to the news bureaus that need them. In doing so, media outlets can maintain an international presence and publish independent, original stories. At the same time, freelance journalists can gain an outlet for their work that pays a fair wage.
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What’s the secret of good writing?
I first encountered Robert Boice’s name about three years ago, somewhere online; after that, it started popping up every other month. Boice, I learned, was a US psychologist who’d cracked the secret of how to write painlessly and productively. Years ago, he’d recorded this wisdom in a book, now out of print, which a handful of fans discussed in reverent tones, but with a title that seemed like a deliberate bid for obscurity: How Writers Journey To Comfort And Fluency. Also, it was absurdly expensive: used copies sold for £130. Still, I’m a sucker for writing advice, especially when so closely guarded. So this month, I succumbed: I found a copy at the saner (if still eye-watering) price of £68, and a plain green print-on-demand hardback arrived in the post. So if you hunger to write more, but instead find yourself procrastinating, or stifled by panic, or writer’s block, I can reveal that the solution to your troubles is…
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Harper Lee: my Christmas in New York
Several years ago, I was living in New York and working for an airline, so I never got home to Alabama for Christmas – if, indeed, I got the day off. To a displaced southerner, Christmas in New York can be rather a melancholy occasion, not because the scene is strange to one far from home, but because it is familiar: New York shoppers evince the same singleness of purpose as slow-moving southerners; Salvation Army bands and Christmas carols are alike the world over; at that time of year, New York streets shine wet with the same gentle farmer’s rain that soaks Alabama’s winter fields.
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Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1
The last time this magazine spoke with Joan Didion, in August of 1977, she was living in California and had just published her third novel, A Book of Common Prayer. Didion was forty-two years old and well-known not only for her fiction but also for her work in magazines—reviews, reportage, and essays—some of which had been collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). In addition, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne (who was himself the subject of a Paris Reviewinterview in 1996), had written a number of screenplays together, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971); an adaptation of her second novel, Play It As It Lays(1972); and A Star Is Born (1976). When Didion’s first interview appeared in these pages in 1978, she was intent on exploring her gift for fiction and nonfiction. Since then, her breadth and craft as a writer have only grown deeper with each project.
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France, Islam, terrorism & integration
“Like other European nations, France has a long and complicated relationship with the Muslim world and its own immigrant population, many of whom have been in the country for generations. French Muslims are highly diverse, and some are secular while others are observant. One of the policemen killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Ahmed Merabet, was Muslim. Some are at the center of society — soccer player Zinedine Zidane, born in Marseille to Algerian parents, led France to a World Cup victory in 1998 — but large segments of the population remain excluded. Research from INSEE, France’s national statistical agency, indicates that in 2013, the unemployment rate for all immigrants was approximately 17.3%, nearly 80% higher than the non-immigrant rate of 9.7%, and descendents of immigrants from Africa have a significantly more difficult time finding work. The report found that the education and skill levels only explained 61% of the difference in employment rates between descendents of African immigrants and those whose parents were born in France.”
About Journalist Resource:
Based at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, the Journalist’s Resource project examines news topics through a research lens. We surface scholarly materials that may be relevant to media practitioners, bloggers, educators, students and general readers. Our philosophy is that peer-reviewed research studies can, at the very least, help anchor journalists as they navigate difficult terrain and competing claims.
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Syria’s collapse, in 7 charts
Since the war in Syria began in 2011, more than 250,000 people have been killed and more than half of Syria’s population has been displaced from their homes. Devastation on this scale is almost impossible to understand in the abstract: What does that kind of disaster do to a country? These numbers on indicators that feel familiar — things like GDP and school attendance rates — can help show how utterly the war has gutted this once-stable nation.
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Swapping Prison Beds For Ankle Bracelets
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been under fire for opening three detention centers to hold Central American immigrant families who fled to this country seeking asylum.
Under the pressure of a federal court order, ICE is now exploring ways to release the mothers and children with alternatives to detention — but human rights activists are unhappy that the same for-profit prison company that locked up the families now manages their cases after release.
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In the ‘Spotlight’: Movies On Journalism
Why is Hollywood so obsessed with journalists lately?
Spotlight is the latest—and best—in a string of recent movies about journalists and the work that they do. Aside from its many cinematic virtues, it’s the rare journalism drama that depicts the news industry both accurately and engrossingly.
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Turkey’s Troubling ISIS Game
By Roger Cohen
Sanliurfa, Turkey – ABOVE a restaurant specializing in sheep’s head soup, with steaming tureens of broth in the window, two young Syrian journalists took up residence in this ancient town in southeastern Turkey. They had fled Raqqa, the stronghold in Syria of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and devoted their time to denouncing the crimes of the barbarous jihadi group. Today, their second-floor apartment is a crime scene, with a red police seal on the door.
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