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HuffPost to launch Arabic edition
The Huffington Post has entered a partnership with a former director general of al-Jazeera Network to launch an Arabic-language edition aimed at the growing number of young people in the Middle East with mobile devices.
The AOL-owned company will launch HuffPost Arabi after teaming up with Wadah Khanfar, who is currently chief executive of Integral Media Strategies.
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Knight News to Award Internet Innovators
BOSTON – June 23, 2014 – Nineteen projects that strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation will receive $3.4 million as winners of the Knight News Challenge. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation made the announcement at the 2014 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference at the MIT Media Lab.
The winners provide a mix of solutions to promote an open Internet that is free and accessible to all. They address issues from privacy and censorship, to expanding the diversity of the tech workforce, to improving digital access and connecting communities with online content in easier, more useful ways. Three of the projects support the work of libraries as essential resources for community information access. Nine of the winners will receive investments of $200,000 to $500,000 each, while 10 early-stage ideas will receive $35,000 each through the Knight Prototype Fund, which helps innovators take media and information projects from idea to demo.
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Western Media Turn from Explaining World
Anjan Sundaram shared the lives of the Congolese to report one of the worst human disasters. Now, he says, journalists focus on an ever-narrower agenda … and miss the real stories
The western news media are in crisis and turning their backs on the world, but we hardly ever notice. Where correspondents were once assigned to a place for months or years, reporters now handle often 20 countries. Bureaux are in hub cities, far from many of the countries they cover. And journalists are often lodged in expensive houses or five-star hotels. As the news has receded, so have our minds.
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Do you know Elise Andrew?
The creator of the Facebook page “I f*cking love science” is journalism’s first self-made brand
In retrospect, I could easily have ignored the picture that appeared on my Facebook feed on a lazy Sunday two years ago, labeled simply “Sand under a 250x magnification.” Cheesy, I thought, glancing at the post, not noticing until my nose grazed the monitor that I’d leaned in closer to look. The grains looked like tiny manmade sculptures, ceramic bulbs of fuchsia, orange, and beige. The gee-whiz appeal of the image was sort of embarrassing, but the result was unquestionably beautiful—and the 5,000-plus people who debated its authenticity in the comments section, calling it, variously, “bullshit,” “impossible,” and “stunning, just stunning,” seemed to agree. In total, 102,832 people “liked” the image, which had been shared by a six-month-old Facebook page with an unforgettable name: “I Fucking Love Science,” or IFLS.
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Ex-Google Hacker Takes on Spy Agencies
During his last six years working as an elite security researcher for Google, the hacker known as Morgan Mayhem spent his nights and weekends hunting down the malware used to spy on vulnerable targets like human rights activists and political dissidents.
His new job tasks him with defending a different endangered species: American national security journalists.
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Technology Offer New Tools for Journalists
LOS ANGELES — The Internet and rapidly evolving technology is quickly changing how people receive news and how journalists deliver it. There are now more ways to tell a story than ever before. One school in Los Angeles is teaching the next generation of journalists with the help of a state-of-the-art newsroom.
When Faith Miller wanted to study journalism in college she didn’t realize how hands-on the experience would be.
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After chemical attack Syria loses attention
A year ago the world was outraged as news of an alleged chemical attack in a Damascus suburb on 21 August 2013 reached the public, and footage of dead and injured Syrians flooded the internet. The UN later confirmed everyone’s worst fears and verified that chemical weapons had been used. At least 500 people were reported to have been killed in the attack, with estimates reaching as high as 1,500 victims.
To US President Obama, this had crossed the line. The public and media outlets felt similarly, with media attention of the Syrian crisis reaching a record high.
Was this political, media and public interest sustained over the ensuing months? Unfortunately not.
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Syrian Refugees Trying to Save Each Other
Mohamad drives with one hand, squinting at the afternoon sun as his phone rings for the fifth time in the past half an hour. The lanky 25-year-old Syrian shrugs the mobile to his ear with one shoulder, scribbling numbers on a Post-it as he repeats them out loud: “$1,000 to Tripoli; $200 to Hiba’s family; $300 to Umm Hanan; $10,000 for the operation.”
We’re in eastern Lebanon, a 90-minute drive from Beirut, a one-hour drive from Damascus, and just five minutes from the Syrian border. Sun beats through the windshield as we thread through the Bekaa Valley, an area known for its poverty, high crime rates, sectarian tensions, and, since 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. I watch Mohamad count out $10,000 in cash.
“It’s for an open-heart surgery,” he tells me. “It took us three months to raise $14,500 for this kid. The operation is tomorrow. Alhamdulillah.”
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A beginner’s guide to data visualisation
As a growing number of international NGOs are using infographics, charts and interactive maps to share success and highlight disaster, how can organisations with less resources create high quality visualisations without having to pay to outsource them?
The Guardian has put together a beginner’s guide for visualising development data.
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James Foley’s Truth
We all owe a debt to James Foley. He was killed in the effort to bring news of the wars in the Arab world to the rest of us, to make them more humanly comprehensible. Foley, who was murdered, on video, by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, was acting on behalf of two principles: the right to know and the need to know. In this sense, Foley’s father did not exaggerate in calling him “a martyr for freedom.” The more I learn about the man and his work, the more my admiration grows. His journalism was clear-eyed, empathetic, and without the bravado that can creep into war reporting as an anesthetic against fear. By the accounts of his former fellow-prisoners (those who happen to be citizens of countries that pay ransom to terror groups), he was generous, thoughtful, good-humored, unbreakable in spirit. If you had to be shackled with someone in terrifying circumstances, for months on end, you would want it to be James Foley.
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Guardian partners with more local news outlets
The Guardian partners with more local news outlets to tell under-reported stories – As the news organization gains footing in the US, more journalistic partnerships are being launched to tell stories from different areas of the country.
The digital age may have increased competition between news outlets as the online fight for clicks and eyeballs becomes ever more fierce, but this week goes to show that digital journalism also enables partnerships that once would have seemed unlikely.
Before the weekend comes around, The Guardian will feature two digital collaborations with smaller, local news outlets: The last of a four-part collaborative project with The Texas Observer about the US immigration crisis and the deaths of undocumented immigrants in Texas goes online today. Later this week, The Guardian and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will be launching a collaborative project about racial profiling in the wake of the events in Ferguson.
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It’s Tartt—But Is It Art?
No one denies that Donna Tartt has written the “It novel” of the year, a runaway best-seller that won her the Pulitzer Prize. But some of the self-appointed high priests of literary criticism—at The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review—are deeply dismayed by The Goldfinch and its success.
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Anti-Arab sentiment on the rise in Turkey
On Aug. 18, Gaziantep, a southeastern industrial city close to the Syrian border, was in a state of panic over a rumor that Syrians had poisoned the drinking water. Last month in Gaziantep and other border towns, protests were staged under the banner “We Do Not Want the Syrians.” The protests led to clashes with the police, physical assaults and vandalism against Syrian-owned businesses. Among the slogans heard were “Tayyip resign,” “City residents do not sleep, retake your city” and “We are the people of this town.” The media is full of sad stories about desperate Syrian, Iraqi and Yazidi refugees, but there is almost no coverage of mounting anti-immigrant sentiment or the increasing frequency of violence against immigrants.
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How is the IS different from other groups?
Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution and Steven Simon of the Middle East Institute join Judy Woodruff to discuss the threat the Islamic State poses and how they’re recruiting members, including westerners.
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Colorless Tazaki & His Years of Pilgrimage
A devotional anticipation is generated by the announcement of a new Haruki Murakami book. Readers wait for his work the way past generations lined up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan. There is a happily frenzied collective expectancy — the effect of cultural voice, the Murakami effect. Within seven days of its midnight release, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” sold over one million copies in Japan. I envision readers queuing up at midnight outside Tokyo bookstores: the alienated, the athletic, the disenchanted and the buoyant. I can’t help wondering what effect the book had on them, and what they were hoping for: the surreal, intra-dimensional side of Murakami or his more minimalist, realist side?
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Putin’s Fear of the Internet
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union introduced a law aimed at stifling ideological dissent. Article 190, Part 1 of the Soviet Criminal Code criminalized “the dissemination of the intentionally false insinuations defiling the Soviet state and social order.” The post-Stalin regime was not the sort of dictatorship that exterminated its own citizens, but it insisted that public expression be in full compliance with the Communist Party line. It was not uncommon for people to be sentenced to years in work camps for “disseminating” three or four copies of underground literature.
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Media Caught Between Extremes In Mideast
Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, there has been little doubt that enhanced access to information and news contributed to political and social activism, pushing the boundaries of free speech, even for a short period of time, to beyond anything that had been seen regionally.
Today, however, there has been a regression in media growth and censorship shows little signs of receding. Media and free speech in the Middle East today are caught between two extremes: radical extremists and government crackdown.
Free speech and journalism are vital tools to inform the public and hold governments accountable. It gives citizens a medium to ask for their rights. When they feel threatened, dictators and extremists take away freedom of speech because it’s the platform to ask for all other rights like access to information, justice, rule of law and better economic conditions.
When ISIS extremists took over the town of Raqqa last year in northern Syria one of the first things they announced was that any political opposition to ISIS was banned.
Media and freedom of speech are inevitably intertwined.
Indeed, momentum for political reform was catalyzed by the regional uprisings in 2011 but for the most part it produced a reactionary crackdown on media freedom, with a particular focus on the Internet.
Since 2011, Egypt, Libya, Iraq and Syria witnessed Internet shut downs. In Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain bloggers were arrested.
One of the reasons some youths in the region took to the streets across the region three years ago was because their economic and political systems were no longer tolerable. Today, answers to these demands have stalled, if not regressed. They will not go away either.
As a member of Leaders of Tomorrow, a youth led organization based in Jordan, I have seen over 400 people gather earlier this year in the historical city of Petra to debate local politics. One year ago, over 1000 people from all walks of life gathered in downtown to discuss press and publications laws.
Political development is an element of stability but in the short term it is on the sliding scale of US interests. It seems the international community is even willing to see development and reform — including media reform — in the Middle East repressed if they believe states like Egypt are going to produce short-term stability.
Despite Egypt’s crackdown on journalists, civil society organizations and the Muslim Brotherhood, US Secretary of State John Kerry voiced strong support for Egypt’s new president and signaled that the US administration would continue with the flow of military aid.
Still, since 2011, utilizing social networking sites as venues to have debates on social issues, and to influence public opinion pushed the boundaries of free speech beyond anything seen so far. In the past years, mainstream news outlets in the region continued to steer away from serious political scrutiny, the task was left to the burgeoning social media sector where the boundaries between news, comment, and activism had been dismantled.
In early 2011, in Jordan, there were successful digital campaigns on environmental and social issues, including an online petition in 2011 to save over 2,000 trees, marked for felling to make way for a new military academy. The campaign achieved a postponement of the project. In doing so, it became a symbol of the empowering potential of digital activism, especially when combined with offline initiatives and actions.
Digitization has made it difficult for governing regimes to prevent Arabs from seeking stories and news content about their community and country from social media and online news. By using Facebook to interact and join groups, Twitter to join debates and find links and having access to Internet sites across the world, it is now nearly impossible to prevent them from gathering news and information.
But digital divides and censorship remain significant obstacles to building outreach and awareness. The spread of social media as a key vehicle for information sharing has also meant that certain communities off the grid have been excluded from the benefits of technological media.
In June 2013, the government in Jordan blocked access to more than 250 news websites under new legislation causing local protests. What seems clear is that since 2011, media reform in the region has become embedded in the wider struggle for political change.
Self-censorship may also be spreading among citizen journalists, bloggers and online reporters. During a recent press conference to announce the cancellation of his comedy show, Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s satirist declared: “The Program doesn’t have a space. It’s not allowed.”
Today many citizens in the region are also looking around and see failed uprisings filled with sectarian bloodshed. They seek stability and safety; emboldened governments are passing restrictive press legislation and the underlying grievances that spurred the 2011 uprisings are buried yet once again.
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Battle for Baghdad
In early June, Abbas Saddam, a private soldier from a Shia district in Baghdad serving in the 11th Division of the Iraqi army, was transferred from Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq, to Mosul in the north. The fighting started not long after he got there. But on the morning of 10 June the commanding officer told his men to stop shooting, hand over their rifles to the insurgents, take off their uniforms and get out of the city. Before they could obey, their barracks were invaded by a crowd of civilians. ‘They threw stones at us,’ Abbas recalled, ‘and shouted: “We don’t want you in our city! You are Maliki’s sons! You are the sons of mutta! You are Safavids! You are the army of Iran!”’
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Scrivener 2 – a tool for writers
Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.
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Refugee Camp in Jordan: a Do-It-Yourself City
ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan — A young Syrian salesman stopped into Ahmad Bidawi’s barbershop for a shave the other day. Music wafted on fan-cooled air. Outside, on what has become the main commercial strip here in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, workers steered handcarts packed with lumber and kitchen appliances through sunbaked crowds hanging out in front of shops.
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The Ghosts of Iraq
On a morning in late April 2013, Peter Gelling, the Middle East and Africa editor at GlobalPost, arrived at his office on the Boston waterfront to find a story filed by one of his reporters, Tracey Shelton. She was one of the few international reporters then working inside Syria. She had just been to Sheik Maqsoud, a neighborhood on the northern edge of Aleppo. Her emailed file reported that the area had been struck by chemical weapons, possibly sarin gas, two weeks earlier.
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Method Journalism
With the launch of new site after new site in 2014, it’s been a fascinating time to watch digital media try to figure itself out. Amid the turmoil of disruption, buffeted by tech companies’ control over information distribution, but aware of new fields of possibility, the past few years were filled with defending legacy brands.
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5 tips for managing investigative journalism projects
At the Polis conference today, three experienced investigative journalists shared practical advice and tool recommendations to help support investigative journalism with limited resources
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Why So Many Failed Protest Movements?
We’re in the middle of a revolution caused by the … collapse of free market capitalism … an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in … individual freedom and a change … about what freedom means,” avers British journalist Paul Mason, the author of Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere.
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Multimedia-rich native advertising from The NYTIMES
A story on the rise of women serving time in prison in the U.S. is the sort of thing you might expect to see from the national desk at The New York Times. If you followed a link to it off Twitter or Facebook, seeing the story’s multimedia features would only support that idea.
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