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OP-ED COLUMNIST: Showtime at the Apollo
Could 2012 be a race between two powerful victims yearning to be lonely at the top?
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Investigative video news channel to launch on YouTube
US Center for Investigative Reporting receives $800k in Knight Foundation funding to create ‘hub for high-quality investigative videos’
The channel will feature videos from major broadcasters – including NPR, ABC and the New York Times – and will also seek contributions from freelance video journalists and independent filmmakers around the world.
The CIR said in a release that journalists would be trained in audience engagement and other best practices for online video. Revenue from the channel will be used to subsidise public interest journalism projects.
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NPR: Revolutionary Road Trip
SPECIAL SERIES
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Revolutionary Road Trip
After last year’s revolutions, the North African states of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt are rewriting the rules that govern their politics, economies and societies. NPR takes a Revolutionary Road Trip across the region to see how these countries are remaking themselves. -
THE TOPPLING: How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war
“Propaganda has been a staple of warfare for ages, but the notion of creating events on the battlefield, as opposed to repackaging real ones after the fact, is a modern development. It expresses a media theory developed by, among others, Walter Lippmann, who after the First World War identified the components of wartime mythmaking as “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality.” As he put it, “Men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities [and] in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.”
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Middle East brain drain shows signs of reversing
“From Libya to Lebanon there is a “reverse brain drain” among young workers, with individuals returning from abroad. Others have decided not to leave in the first place.”
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Photos: In Southern Turkey, Syrian Refugees Wait Out the War
In Southern Turkey, Syrian Refugees Wait Out the War
In a tent encampment in Turkey, 6,500 Syrians are waiting out, or simply taking a respite from, the war being fought just beyond the nearby border.
Take a look at these photos:
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One Year of Hope
“When I was in secondary school in Aleppo, one of the required English texts was an abridged version of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Back then, I sat at an old wooden bench with two girls — who were once my best friends, but now we barely speak — and together we read dusty words about a revolution steeped in blood and sacrifice in a place that seemed so far away in time and space from our isolated lives.
The story of two places, rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, was also the story of our Syria. When we read Dickens, we could not imagine similar scenes unfolding in Syria during our lifetime. In 2011, scenes of protests and funerals, torture and murder, international press conferences and presidential interviews, were recorded not on the pages of a novel but in videos and photographs, in tweets and Facebook statuses, transferred via Skype and YouTube. Over two centuries later we would write the same story: the story of a revolution.”
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Aaron Sorkin: The Writer Behind ‘The Newsroom’
Radio interview:
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“The writer’s new HBO drama is made in the mold of his hit series The West Wing.” -
Adonis: Selected Poems
“Adonis: Selected Poems is thus a landmark: the collection matters not just because of its internal beauty, but because it provides a window on the career of one of Arabic literature’s transformational poets.”
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Hunter Thompson: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in ‘72
BY Hunter S. Thompson
July 5, 1973 12:00 AM ET
This story is from the July 5th, 1973 issue of Rolling Stone.“Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future.”
– Raoul Duke, Christmas Eve 1972
The following disconnected excerpts from Dr. Thompson’s political book ‘Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail’ were selected more or less at random from the massive text of his book on the 1972 presidential campaign. The author assumes no final responsibility for whatever follows.
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College Newspapers Go Digital-First, Innovate To Stay Relevant
This fall, the University of Oregon’s Daily Emerald — a print publication for more than 90 years — will ditch the daily for digital, publish a twice-weekly magazine, and launch a mini-tech start-up called The Garage.
It’s a digital-first strategy similar to one adopted at the University of Georgia, which killed the daily Red & Black last year in favor of a weekly publication. Meanwhile, student newspapers like UCLA’s Daily Bruin aren’t giving up the daily print edition, but are planning to churn out thousands of apps for every aspect of student life to help supplement lost print advertising revenue.
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Oped: The Trouble With Online Education
Internet courses are monologues. True learning is a dialogue.
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The number you need to know on Syria
“I’ll start with a simple number: 20,000. Granted it’s rounded up a little—from 19,738. Rounding up works well on the page, but also belittles its subject. It gives us a solid number to latch on to, for the media to print, for the memory to hold. But 19,738 is the exact count of lives that have been lost so far in the war in Syria, according to a volunteer, nonprofit group called Syria Tracker. And when it comes to this conflict, every little number, every single life, counts.”
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Mobile Technology Transforming Classrooms, Empowering Young Women in Jordan
“Technology in classrooms often seems like an add-on, an extra luxury for developed education systems. But, as Edith Saldivar explains in today’s Digital Diversity, IT can help students all over the world learn in entirely new ways. The company Edith works for, Qualcomm, has been helping students in Jordan use IT to transform their education – in particular young women. This work is carried out through their Wireless Reach™ initiative, a program that brings wireless technology to underserved communities globally. To date, Wireless Reach has 64 projects in 27 countries. Edith explains the surprising effects it has had in Jordan’s schools, below.”
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The iPad Is Quickly Becoming Our Primary Computer
“As you can see, after just three years, the iPad is becoming the primary computer for users. When we first ran the survey, only 29.1% of people said it was a primary computer. Today, it’s 46.7% of users.
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In the last three years, the iPad has gotten lighter and more powerful. Additionally, developers have built a variety of applications to make it more useful. Imagine what’s going to happen in the next three years.” -
Election laws: Voting rights, voting wrongs
FLORIDA’S state primary is a month away, the presidential election is four months off and the Palm Beach County League of Women Voters (LWV) is busy. During the lunch rush at JFK Medical Centre on a recent Tuesday afternoon, several volunteers fanned out across the cafeteria, registration forms in hand. This was the first of three hospital-based voter-registration drives planned for the week, and it followed an event on July 4th that yielded 23 new registrations.
The Independence Day event was, however, the group’s first of the summer. Corinne Miller, the volunteer in charge of the JFK drive, says that by this stage in previous elections the LWV had already completed up to 30 drives. This time their efforts have been disrupted by a row over a law that went into effect last year, requiring all completed voter-registration forms to be submitted to the electoral authorities within 48 hours or risk a fine. Dennis Baxley, the Florida representative who sponsored the original bill, said the law was intended to encourage those registering to turn in the forms promptly, and to “minimise opportunities for mischief”. A federal judge disagreed, striking down the 48-hour rule on May 31st as excessive. But a degree of damage has already been done.
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Supporting stability, abetting repression
Supporting stability, abetting repression
BY TOBIAS HAGMANNBERKELEY, CALIFORNIA — Next time I travel to Ethiopia, I may be arrested as a terrorist. Why? Because I have published articles about Ethiopian politics.
I wrote a policy report on Ethiopia’s difficulties with federalism. I gave a talk in which I questioned Ethiopia’s May 2010 elections, in which the ruling EPRDF party (Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front) won 545 out of 547 seats in the Parliament. As part of my ongoing research on mass violence in the Somali territories, I interviewed members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a separatist rebel group in eastern Ethiopia that the government has designated as a terrorist organization.
In the eyes of the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, my work is tantamount to subversion. Not only do his officials have zero tolerance for criticism, they consider people who either talk to or write about the opposition as abetting terrorists.
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NYTimes: Seeking a Laptop? What You Need to Know
TOOL KIT: Seeking a Laptop? What You Need to Know
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A step-by-step consideration of the features to think about in choosing a new laptop. -
Daily tablet newspaper’s future in doubt after huge first-year losses
Bosses at Rupert Murdoch’s embattled tablet-only newspaper, the Daily, have hit back at rumours of its demise, dismissing doom-laden reports as “misinformed” and “untrue”.
Staff at the Daily were said to be fearful of the product’s future after the loss-making venture was reportedly put “on watch” by parent company News Corporation.
Yet in an email to staff on Friday, editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo said they should “ignore” reports in the press.
News Corporation is said to be weighing the value of maintaining the app as it prepares to separate its publishing and film wings, and will assess whether to shut down the app later this year.
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Ethiopian journalist jailed for 18 years
An Ethiopian court on Friday jailed a journalist for 18 years for “terrorism” and 23 others, reporters and activists, for between eight years and life, after a trial condemned by rights groups.
Journalist Eskinder Nga was jailed for 18 years, while opposition member Andualem Arage got life because of “the heaviness of the case” after he was convicted of participating with an outlawed group, Judge Hussein Yimer said.
Both men were found guilty of “participation in a terrorist organisation” and “planning…(a) terrorist act”.
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The influential Syrian general who could bear Assad no more
“The Tlass family were once acolytes of the Assad dynasty, but as the regime crackdown targeted their fellow Sunni clansmen, they hatched a plan to flee to Paris. Julian Borger, Martin Chulov and Kim Willsher report on what the escape of Manaf Tlass reveals about the strategy of the ‘Friends of Syria'”
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Egypt entrepreneurs fear for future
As politicians and economists start drawing up plans to bring Egypt’s economy back from the brink, the country’s small business owners say they are unlikely to reap benefits any time soon.
The election of a new president, Mohammed Morsi,has put the country on a firmer footing on the path to establishing civil democratic rule.
But changes to the cabinet and delays on rewriting the constitution have kept the economic situation uncertain.
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Science’s Long—and Successful—Search for Where Memory Lives
“Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell appeared outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre
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to write their names and leave imprints of their hands and high heels in the wet concrete. Down on their knees, supported by a velvet-covered pillow for their elbows, they wrote “Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes” in looping script, followed by their signatures and the date, 6-26-53. But how did those watching the
events of that day manage to imprint a memory trace of it, etching the details with neurons and synapses in the soft cement of the brain? Where and how are those memories written, and what is the molecular alphabet that spells out the
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Tiny Camera to Rival the Pros
This is a review of the best pocket camera ever made.
The Sony RX100 has a huge one-inch sensor — the biggest ever stuffed into a pocketable zoom camera. More Photos »
But first, a history lesson.
For years camera makers worried about competition from only one source: other camera makers. But in the end, the most dangerous predator came from an unexpected direction: cellphones.
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How journalists decide to interview
How journalists decide whether to interview by phone, email or face-to-face?
“I recently came across a 1997 American Journalism Review story that discussed “the newest communication tool” for journalists: email interviews.
In the years since, stories highlighting email interviews have often placed journalists into two camps: those who think they’re acceptable and those who don’t. But as I’ve learned from my own interviewing methods and from talking with other journalists, the issue’s not that black and white.”
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