Janine di Giovanni asks: “When Staffan de Mistura became UN special envoy, his past successes brought hope for peace. A year later, with no solution in sight, he faces heavy criticism. Has his innovative diplomacy failed or is it simply mission impossible?”
-
World needs to know about Yemen’s war
One Friday in Old Sana’a, while filming the aftermath of the Saudi-led coalition bombings, I found myself surrounded by a group of militia who were trying to take hold of my camera. I was detained for a few hours in the ruins, confused and unnerved. The interrogation I received from the Houthis was relentless. But the problems didn’t stop here. For a week, I was harassed with regular phone calls and visits from National Security officials at my hotel. All this despite having a press visa issued in London.
... -
‘Less transaction, more relation’
“My origin story is a tale of constant change. The most recent transition, from running the multimedia desk at the New York Times to chairing the University of Oregon’s Agora Journalism Center, is filled with many life lessons. I often describe this transformation as one of perspective: focusing less on how audiences interact with content on the screen but more about how, because of stories, we engage with each other as a community. Less transaction, more relation; less on audience, more on community.”
... -
There Is Only One Way to Defeat ISIS
There was a strange stillness in the news on Saturday morning, a Saturday morning that came earlier in Paris than it did in Des Moines, a city in Iowa, one of the United States of America. The body count had stabilized. The new information came at a slow, stately pace, as though life were rearranging itself out of quiet respect for the dead. The new information came at a slow and stately pace and it arranged itself in the way that you suspected it would arrange itself when the first accounts of the mass murder began to spread out over the wired world. There has been the predictable howling from predictable people. (Judith Miller? Really? This is an opinion the world needed to hear?) There has been the straining to wedge the events of Friday night into the Procrustean nonsense of an American presidential campaign. There will be a debate among the three Democratic candidates for president in Des Moines on Saturday night. I suspect that the moderators had to toss out a whole raft of questions they already had prepared. Everything else is a distraction. It is the stately, stillness of the news itself that matters.
... -
Consequences of media crackdowns
The recent awarding of the EU’s top human rights prize to imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi is shining the spotlight once again on the rampant abuse of freedom of expression in the Middle East and North Africa. Although Arab autocrats have long used control of the press to silence opposition, in recent months the state has turned up the heat on both traditional and digital media actors in some not-so-surprising places, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and some surprising places, like Morocco and Tunisia.
... -
Virtual Reality: A New Way to Tell Stories
“Until now, V.R. has been seen mostly as a revolutionary new platform for video games, but it has the potential to transform journalism as well. At the magazine, we first began experimenting with the technology in April, when we shot a short film with the V.R. production studio Vrse about the making of our “Walking New York” cover. We didn’t promote this project at the time, but we were happy enough with the results to begin making plans for the film that we’re releasing now, also a collaboration with Vrse: a 10-minute journey through the lives of three different children who have been driven from their homes by war.”
... -
Top writing tips for young writers
How do you get started on a writing career? As the Sunday Times / PFD Young writer of the year award returns, the Guardian asks past winners including Sarah Waters, Ross Raisin and Helen Simpson for their top tips for young.
... -
Illustrator’s glimpses of life under ISIS
Molly Crabapple, a New York-based writer and illustrator, has created a series of illustrations for Vanity Fair showing street scenes of Mosul, Iraq.
... -
Pulling Turkey back from brink of civil war?
In this long form article published in the Guardian, Christopher de Bellaigue delves into the origins of Selahattin Demirtaş involvement in politics, dissecting the history of Turkey’s People’s Democractic Party (HDP).
... -
Where does UK aid to Syria actually go?
The UK’s Department for International Development is spending over £1bn on aid for Syria. But where is it going and how much is reaching the Syrians it is supposed to help, asks Simon Cox.
... -
Fresh Look At Istanbul In ‘Strangeness’
Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk loves Istanbul. But he is a creature of the affluent corners of the city where he grew up and now lives, and he has written many times about the lives of Istanbul’s secular upper class. His latest novel,A Strangeness in My Mind, is the story of a street peddler, one of the millions who began immigrating to Istanbul in the 1950s from small villages in the country.
... -
Life in Baghdad: Joy Amid the Chaos of War
A rare and surprising look at the everyday lives of ordinary young Iraqis. Against the backdrop of war, life goes on. Families are still attending carnivals and eating ice cream, young boys are diving into canals, teenagers are dancing in the streets. Most videos from Iraq don’t make you smile. This one will.
... -
“You are worth being paid for it”
A very nice editor at Huffington Post contacted me yesterday, and asked me if I would be willing to grant permission for the site to republish my post about the seven things I did to reboot my life.
Huffington Post has a lot of views, and reaches a pretty big audience, and that post is something I’d love to share with more people, so I told the editor that I was intrigued, and asked what they pay contributors.
Well, it turns out that, “Unfortunately, we’re unable to financially compensate our bloggers at this time. Most bloggers find value in the unique platform and reach our site provides, but we completely understand if that makes blogging with us impossible.”
... -
Humans of NY helps us go beyond headlines
Yet HONY borrows from long-standing journalistic and documentary practices. For example, the British social documentary movement, which started in the 1930s, was premised on the importance of telling the stories of “ordinary” people to counter the dominance of elite and upper class in the media. My own research on the role of emotion in journalistic story-telling demonstrates that the most highly regarded journalism – Pulitzer Prize winning reports – draw extensively on emotive and personal story-telling as a means of illustrating what are often very complex and abstract issues, ranging from the fate of the New Jersey fishing industry to breakthroughs in the use of DNA technology for medical treatments.
... -
Europe’s Spending on Migrant Crisis
Some half-a-million migrants have streamed into Europe this year. To help ease the crisis, the European Union and its member states have pledged billions to help the migrants arriving on their shores. But countries and nonprofit groups are strapped for cash, and the money is spent as soon as it’s received.
The EU has already burned through $80 million in emergency funding, and another $100 million is on the way. Meanwhile, Germany alone is preparing to shell out $11 billion a year to take care of the 800,000 migrants it expects to receive. What is the money spent on?
Watch this video to find out.
... -
My Escape From Syria: Europe or Die
Ismail, 25, filmed his journey to Germany with 19-year-old Naeem, capturing the most dangerous parts of a perilous trip, including the boat crossing from Turkey to Greece where hundreds of refugees have died this year.
In this exclusive footage, VICE News gives an insight into a desperate trek, as Ismail and Naeem give first-hand accounts of their journey, the life they left behind, and their hopes for the future.
... -
Truck deaths: voyage to Europe
In August the decomposing bodies of 71 migrants were found in an abandoned truck in Austria. In the most complete account to date, we tell the story of one of the victims, Saeed Othman Mohammed, and how he came to die.
... -
Arts and Culture in an Open Society
You could say it takes a wild imagination to picture a truly open society—one where freedom of expression and democracy are paramount, and where no one holds a monopoly on the truth. Envisioning such a world is the starting point for the Open Society Foundations’ work. And often, it is the arts that make manifest that vision, lending form to our goals and ideals.
... -
Voices from Chernobyl
The Paris Review published excerpts from Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl:
“He started to change—every day I met a brand-new person. The burns started to come to the surface. In his mouth, on his tongue, his cheeks—at first there were little lesions, and then they grew. It came off in layers—as white film . . . the color of his face . . . his body . . . blue . . . red . . . gray-brown. And it’s all so very mine! It’s impossible to describe! It’s impossible to write down! Or even to get over. The only thing that saved me was that it happened so fast; there wasn’t any time to think, there wasn’t any time to cry.”
... -
Visual Content for Storytelling
It’s probably not news to you that effective visual content is key to success on social media. What you might not know, however, is just how important it is to expert marketers who are tasked with telling brand stories. Luckily, there’s an infographic for that. eMarketer recently reported on research from the CMO Council and Libris which uncovered some very compelling data about the way marketers are using visuals in marketing today.
... -
The Hijackers
Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad dynasty, established by a clan of the Prophet’s tribe to rule the first Islamic empire. Syria is where, in 1516, the absorption of the Arab world into the Ottoman Empire began, with the Ottoman victory in the battle of Marj Dabiq; where the nahda, the cultural renaissance of the Arab world, blossomed in the 19th century; where the unified Arab kingdom that the British promised the Hashemites, who led the 1916-18 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, was to have its capital. It is where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the most politically developed and socially radical version of the dream of Arab unity was conceived by the founders of the Arab Socialist Baath (‘resurrection’) Party. Syria is also the terminus of the Arab Spring.
... -
The 100 Best Instagram Accounts
steveyeun
If you guessed that Steve Yeun, a.k.a. The Walking Dead’s gentleman hero Glenn, was a refreshingly modest TV star, his Instagram account would prove you intuitive. Whether it’s arty nature shots of seals by the shore (with quietly awed captioning) or unfussy glimpses into the moments before a media commitment, Yeun invites followers to experience celebrity from the outside in, even after you’ve passed through the ropes. He also unselfishly sends back pretty dispatches from places like Tokyo, making him a really awesome A-lister to virtually travel with.
One of the 100 best Instagram accounts the Rolling Stones brings you.
... -
The Shape of Things to Come
In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has a bench-pressing bulk that he carries a little sheepishly, as if it belonged to someone else—has described himself as both “deeply, deeply tired” and “always anxious.” When he sits down, on an aluminum stool in Apple’s design studio, or in the cream leather back seat of his Bentley Mulsanne, a car for a head of state, he is likely to emit a soft, half-ironic groan. His manner suggests the burden of being fully appreciated. There were times, during the past two decades, when he considered leaving Apple, but he stayed, becoming an intimate friend of Steve Jobs and establishing the build and the finish of the iMac, the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. He is now one of the two most powerful people in the world’s most valuable company. He sometimes listens to CNBC Radio on his hour-long commute from San Francisco to Apple’s offices, in Silicon Valley, but he’s uncomfortable knowing that a hundred thousand Apple employees rely on his decision-making—his taste—and that a sudden announcement of his retirement would ambush Apple shareholders. (To take a number: a ten-percent drop in Apple’s valuation represents seventy-one billion dollars.) According to Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, who is close to Ive and his family, “Jony’s an artist with an artist’s temperament, and he’d be the first to tell you artists aren’t supposed to be responsible for this kind of thing.”
... -
A Personal History on Writing in Cafés
“I WENT TO MY first café to escape my mother, not yet knowing that she had once done the same thing — escaped her own parents by walking down the rickety stairs to the basement of the Starr Book Shop in Harvard Square, where she established a makeshift coffeehouse. She did this while she was a high school student in Cambridge in the 1950s, when the Square was still academic shabby, still full of beatniks, decades before the place would be cleaned, covered with money, and left in its current condition, an open-air shopping mall with a red-brick-and-ivy theme. In a basement filled with slowly degrading acidic paper between slowly degrading cardboard covers, my mother wrote poetry, met with friends, and drank the thinnest coffee you can imagine. In college at Radcliffe, she moved across the street to the Pamplona, one of the few remaining businesses that’s been in Harvard Square longer than my family’s been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she would, in time, write her own scholarly books there. The coffee at the Pamplona has never been good, but that was never the point of the place. Even with a new coat of paint it still feels grimy enough to think smart thoughts. The Pamplona has a modesty that’s getting harder to find as cafés — and, thankfully, coffee — get better and better. It comes from a time when we asked less of our amenities.”
... -
Slow Journalism in Age of Instant Info
As news cycles speed up, ‘slow’ journalists take months—even years—to report and tell in-depth stories.
“Everyone is going faster and faster and getting shallower and shallower,” says Salopek. “I said, ‘How about we slow down a bit to grab a little mindshare by going in the opposite direction.’ The rewards have been far in excess of my expectations, both professionally and personally. It’s a sense of narrative direction I never had before when I was flying around the world and telling stories of the crisis of the day that seemed disconnected.”
... -
Man with the toughest job in the world
...