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Animated journalist survival guide looks ahead
A new English/Arabic online tool is available for citizen journalists who have no previous journalism experience or training but are reporting dangerous frontline stories. It uses animation–a novelty for such guides–and its arrival is timely.
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Top Influential Women in Mid East Art
Slowly but surely, Middle Eastern art is gaining international recognition, a transformation in which, whether as collectors or directors, writers or curators, Middle Eastern women are playing a vital role. We have compiled a list of 10 influential women in the Middle East’s art scene who are leading creativity in the region and challenging stereotypes as they do so.
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Baghdad Is a Setting, and a Character, Too
ON an evening just a few days before his novel would win a top Arabic literary prize, Ahmed Saadawi was relaxing with his writer friends at a Baghdad cafe, a place so special to him that he had written it into his book.
About an hour after he left, a suicide bomber struck, wounding several of his friends and killing some others. It was a common enough experience for Mr. Saadawi — as it is for anyone who has lived for the last decade in Baghdad, where the simple matter of timing can determine who lives and who dies.
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Lebanon on the brink
Political gridlock, economic torpor and the machinations of pro-Syrian Hizbollah – the non-state regional superpower – have once more pushed the crossroads of the Middle East to the edge of collapse
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Death of Homepages & Future of News
This is the clearest illustration of the demise of homepages I’ve seen. (Well, not literally the clearest; it’s somewhat grainy, in an apropos way.) News used to be a destination, and you would go find it on your driveway and in your browser. Now you’re the destination, and “information—status updates, photos of your friends, videos of Solange, and sometimes even news articles—come at you; they find you,” Quartz’s Zach Seward writes.
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Net Neutrality Rules for Debate
On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to open for public debate new rules meant to guarantee an open Internet. Before the plan becomes final, though, the chairman of the commission, Tom Wheeler, will need to convince his colleagues and an array of powerful lobbying groups that the plan follows the principle of net neutrality, the idea that all content running through the Internet’s pipes is treated equally.
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Artists at war: inside PLO’s info department
The Palestinian Revolution was fought with posters and films as well as rocks and bullets. As a new exhibition opens, Nicholas Blincoe looks at the work of the PLO’s information department
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Immediacy vs. importance
The tension underlying how the NYTimes.com homepage gets made
In this excerpt of her new book — based on months spent observing the inner workings of the Times’ newsroom — Nikki Usher shows how some of digital news’ most important real estate gets allocated, minute by minute.
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Back to square one for Egypt’s media?
In the sprawling desert west of Cairo, a huge complex of studios for the Arab world’s largest media market beams content to NileSat, the Egyptian state-owned satellite provider. Despite the size of the market and all the strata of its consumers, not to mention the dynamism of uprisings that have unseated two presidents, the structure and nature of Egypt’s media landscape remains fairly unchanged compared to three years ago.
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Girl Scouts & A Safeway Store in Refugee Camp
“On a sunny afternoon in the dusty, overcrowded Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, a group of Syrian girls recites a familiar pledge and hope to change their future. The youngsters promise to serve God and country, to help people at all times and live by the laws of the Girl Scouts.”
Listen to this NPR radio report by Deborah Amos.
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Evaporated
Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. More than 60 have been killed there since the war began, and many others have been kidnapped, becoming pawns in the conflict. The author picks up the trail of two colleagues, Austin Tice and Jim Foley, who vanished in 2012.
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Stoner: the must-read novel of 2013
Fifty years after it was first published to little fanfare, Stoner, the story of an academic whose life is full of disappointments, has become an unexpected bestseller. Julian Barnes on how a novel he’d never heard of became his book of the year.
On 13 June 1963, the American novelist John Williams wrote from the University of Denver, where he was a professor of English, to his agent Marie Rodell. She had just read his third novel, Stoner, and while clearly admiring it, was also warning him not to get his hopes up. Williams replied: “I suspect that I agree with you about the commercial possibilities; but I also suspect that the novel may surprise us in this respect. Oh, I have no illusions that it will be a ‘bestseller’ or anything like that; but if it is handled right (there’s always that out) – that is, if it is not treated as just another ‘academic novel’ by the publisher, as Butcher’s Crossing [his second novel] was treated as a “western”, it might have a respectable sale. The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s a good novel; in time it may even be thought of as a substantially good one.”
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After the Protests
A well articulated op-ed by Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, on the strengths and pitfalls of social media in modern day revolutions.
“Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime. And whether these take place in Turkey, Egypt or Ukraine, pundits often speculate that the days of a ruling party or government, or at least its unpopular policies, must be numbered. Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.”
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Does Digital Media Mean Better Media?
Back in 2005, we launched Television Across Europe, a study that examined the state of broadcast regulation in 20 countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, in an attempt to nail down problems in the way broadcast media was regulated and to recommend ways to improve the regulatory environment in which journalists and media operated.
The findings were rather grim. Pressures on journalists from mighty owners, ailing public service broadcasters, and politicized regulators were making the work of journalists in this region a painful enterprise.
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Triumph of the will: Putin’s war against Russia’s last independent TV channel
Away from Ukraine, Kremlin is fighting a campaign that is part of rehashed agenda that sees media as propaganda automatons.
“We didn’t have to do anything particularly cunning to achieve this – we just filmed the kinds of things that had disappeared from Russian TV over the previous 15 years: live broadcasts, cutting-edge interviews with politicians and public figures, live feeds from different parts of the world. We interviewed not just opposition figures, but also the leadership, including Dmitry Medvedev, asking them uncomfortable questions live that simply wouldn’t get asked on state TV.”
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Pulitzer Winner: ‘Toms River’ by Dan Fagin
This year’s Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction was awarded yesterday to Dan Fagin, an NYU science journalism professor, for Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. According to the Pulitzer committee, Fagin’s book, which chronicles the effects of chemical waste dumping on a small New Jersey community, “deftly combines investigative reporting and historical research to probe a New Jersey seashore town’s cluster of childhood cancers linked to water and air pollution.”
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What’s The Point Of Journalism School?
Callie Schweitzer is a one-woman counterargument. She’s a 21-year-old senior from Westchester, N.Y., and she’s already had internships at People magazine and The New York Times. Schweitzer used to write for the independent student paper, . Now she’s the editor-in-chief of , the 24-hour online news website for USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
“I don’t believe it when people say journalism is dead,” Schweitzer says. “I’m the one raising my hand saying, ‘No it’s not!’ I think it will always exist.”
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iPad Microsoft Office: Delightfully Familiar
“If you love Office on your computer, you’ll love it on your iPad. If you’ve always hated it, that won’t change, either; now you’ll just have one more place to hate it.”
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Yehia Ghanem: From Cage To Exile
Yehia Ghanem, one of Egypt’s most respected journalists, is living in exile in New York, separated from his family and uncertain of his future. If he returns to Egypt, he faces two years of hard labor in prison after a sham trial that convicted several dozen Egyptians with connections to international NGO’s of illegally taking money from foreigners. A Dart Center exclusive.
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10 free online tools for teaching and learning
Louisa Mellor reveals ten free online tools that might change your teaching for the better.
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Syria’s uprising within an uprising
It was bound to happen, this uprising within an uprising against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a transnational ultraconservative Islamist group that ostensibly fights alongside Syria’s disparate rebel groups but more often intimidates, antagonises, or opposes most of them, including other conservative Islamists.
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Why Free Speech Loses in India
The news from India these days is rarely cheery. The country’s long-overdue winning streak in the international press, which saw old clichés upgraded to shiny new high-tech models, ended around 2010. Since then, the headlines have been relentlessly grim: corruption, poverty, political dysfunction, violence against women, mistreatment of maids, and the criminalization of homosexuality. On Thursday morning, the big story was a brawl inside the Indian Parliament, during which a lawmaker used a can of pepper spray against his colleagues.
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The enlightened king of Iraq
Faisal I was humane, far-sighted, distinguished — and rather dishy, shows Ali A. Allawi in his hefty if loosely-written biography.
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Search Wikileaks
Searching WikiLeaks for documents about a particular topic, event or individual just got a little bit easier. The whistle-blowing site now offers a search engine where you can query its entire database of published documents for a specific phrase or keyword of your choosing.
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Web Fiction, Serialized and Social
Every few days, Anna Todd uses Wattpad, a storytelling app, to post a new episode of this couple’s torrid tale. Chapter 278 of “After” came out last week, moments after Ms. Todd, a 25-year-old former college student in Austin, Tex., finished writing it.
The first comment appeared 13 seconds after the chapter was uploaded. By the next day, there were 10,000 comments: always brief, overwhelmingly positive, sometimes coherent. “After” has more than a million readers, Wattpad says.
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