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Syria “Diary” by Layla Al-Zubaidi
“Welcome to Assad’s Syria,’ the signpost at the Lebanese-Syrian border still says, letting the visitor know who owns the country. The ceasefire had just been announced, but few Syrians I knew held out much hope that three hundred UN observers could keep an eye on the whole army. The journey from Beirut to Damascus by shared taxi takes less than three hours. For years I’ve come this way to visit the Syrian side of my family. It was clear that things had changed. Political talk among the passengers used to be limited to hushed complaints about the border police. The taxi drivers would stick a packet of Marlboros and a banknote into the pocket of the customs officers to speed things up. Occasionally they’d mumble an Arab proverb: ‘If you want the grapes, don’t upset the gardener.’
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Jacqueline Rose on Marilyn Monroe
“She was luminous – on that much everyone seems to agree. Hers is not the flawless matt beauty of Dietrich or Garbo. She is, as one might say, more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed). That is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the recent My Week with Marilyn could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what – in the aura that surrounds her – she was lighting up or revealing, other than herself, is rarely asked.”
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Ray Bradbury, 1920–2012
“Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.”
—Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203
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Recalling the Egyptian Revolution
In the aftermath of the recent presidential elections and the sentencing of Hosni Mubarak, the attention of many observers within and outside Egypt has turned to the complexities of the country’s immediate future. This focus is entirely understandable given Egypt’s prominent place in the wider Arab world and the intractable challenges it now confronts. But it has also entailed a certain emotional and intellectual distance from the transformative events that transfixed the world in January and February 2011. The uprising that took most visible form in the Tahrir Square protests is already retreating into the twilit realm of history and memory.
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US democracy programmes aided favoured groups in Egypt
Employees at US group alleged programmes are less about helping Egyptians and more about serving American interests
IRI officials deny doing anything improper and dismiss the former employees as disgruntled. But the workers’ small revolt, unknown to most, was significant because it reflected a growing sense in Egypt that US-backed democracy programmes were less about helping Egyptians and more about serving American interests.
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Is Technology Fostering a Race to the Bottom?
In the West, a new informal economy is in the making – a peculiar byproduct of the digital revolution that has freelancers doing tasks rather than workers holding jobs.
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Treading a Fine Line by Teaching Journalism in China
At the more progressive campuses, there is a struggle between those who say the media should serve the state, and those who see them as independent monitors.
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Corruption runs deep in the Middle East, poll finds
he Media Line Staff
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Amman, Jordan David Rosenberg / The Med – It’s been a tough year for officials on the take in Jordan.
Spurred by chronic street protests, whose list of grievances is topped by official malfeasance, former Amman mayor Omar Maani was arrested on fraud charges in December and two months later, Mohammad Dahabi, former director of Jordan’s intelligence service, was taken into custody on charges of money laundering.
The year is not half over, but Jordan’s Anti-Corruption Commission has already referred 41 cases of suspected wrongdoing to the judiciary. Even a member of the country’s anti-corruption panel, Sanaa Mihyar, was detained briefly this month. She and her old boss, Amer Bashir, a former deputy mayor of Amman, have been charged with graft in connection with the purchase of two garbage trucks.
Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), fighting corruption has been the clarion call of Arab Spring protestors, ensnaring once untouchable officials in places like Egypt and Libya. But if a survey published this week by the accounting firm Ernst & Young and the security consulting firm Perpetuity Research and Consultancy International is correct, the anti-corruption drive has barely scratched the surface. -
Three Varied Tools for Blogging With a Hand-Held
Being a dedicated blogger once meant accepting life as a laptop nomad or being shackled to a desktop workstation.
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Now, with a mobile device and the right apps, bloggers barely need to touch a conventional keypad to keep readers sated. Popular blogging services like Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress have free apps for Android and Apple, and while those apps are sometimes flawed, they’re generally good enough to download.
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What Journalists Need for the Future
In a guest post Alexandra Stark, Swiss journalist and Head of Studies at MAZ – the Swiss School of Journalism, argues that it’s time for journalists to take action on business models for supporting journalism. Stark proposes a broadened set of skills and a new structure to enable greater involvement from journalists, while also fostering further teaching of such skills.
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Is Philanthropy Print Journalism’s Last Hope?
The Ford Foundation recently pledged $1.04 million to Los Angeles’ struggling daily. We might be looking at the future of newspapers.
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It was startling to read last week that the Ford Foundation was awarding a two-year grant of $1.04 million to the Los Angeles Times for the hiring of reporters. The money will be used for coverage of immigration issues, including the Korean and Vietnamese communities, the California prison system, and the border region with Mexico, and to staff a bureau in Brazil. Ford has long been a supporter of journalism, with an emphasis on public broadcasting and nonprofit enterprises. But this grant represents a different approach: support for a newspaper currently in bankruptcy that has endured years of cutbacks in its resources and revenues. While still the most formidable news organization in California, the Los Angeles Times carries the stigma of its acquisition by Sam Zell, the real estate magnate whose purchase of the Tribune Co. in 2007 was a disaster that remains unresolved and in litigation. Foundation grants are not generally thought to provide support for institutions in trouble, but rather to give backing to innovation and enterprises solely operating in the public interest. -
The Coming Arab Identity Crisis – The Atlantic
As independence movements pushed out European imperialists, Arabs were finally no longer second-class citizens in their own countries. Wahab’s song for “a perfect unity” captured a goal that today, as democratic movements sweep the region, has returned to once again fill Arabs with hope and pride.
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Sentences Crisp, Sassy, Stirring
Different sentences carry different weight, and we can craft them not just to get an idea across, but also to convey attitude or elicit emotion.
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The Syria Crisis: Is Al-Qaeda Intervening in the Conflict?
There are several elements in the ongoing violence in Syria. There is the use of security forces by President Bashar Assad’s regime; there are the reprisals and counterviolence by hodgepodge mix of defectors and armed civilians constituting the Free Syrian Army; and then there are coordinated attacks like last week’s twin car bombings near a military-intelligence branch in a Damascene neighborhood, which reportedly killed at least 55 and wounded hundreds.
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App of the week for journalists
Byword, a great text editor for iPhone/iPad.
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What is it? A text editor that allows HTML and syncs with Dropbox and iCloud.
How is it of use to journalists? It allows journalists to write text articles on an iPad or iPhone and easily export.
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Democracy in Development
Spending on foreign assistance by developed countries decreased in real terms in 2011, the first such decrease since 1997. Given ongoing economic troubles in the United States, Japan, and Europe, flat-line or declining aid budgets from OECD countries are likely to be the new normal. But foreign assistance from emerging economies is growing fast, albeit from a low starting point.
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Investigative video news channel to launch on YouTube
Two not-for-profit news organisations in the United States have teamed up to launch a new channel on YouTube dedicated to investigaive reporting. The channel, which is due to launch in July, aims to become a “hub for high-quality, high-impact investigative videos” and is backed by $800,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation.It is a partnership between the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative News Network, who will work together to promote the channel and to engage users through social media and online chats.
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Want to Broadcast Live? Livestream Makes It Easy
Free apps and webcam-based streaming services make putting live video on the Internet accessible to just about anyone with a connected device. Streaming broadcast-quality live video, however, still requires expensive equipment that most people don’t have on hand. Livestream, a site for streaming live events, is aiming to lower this barrier of entry with its first hardware product.Read more
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A Chicago start-up developed software that writes
In a few short years, we’ve learned to delegate all manner of tasks to computers. For music recommendations or driving directions or academic scouring, we readily turn to our clever machines. They do it better most of the time, and with much less effort.
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Now computers have proven competence—no, fluency—in yet another aspect of human life: writing. Narrative Science, a Chicago-based startup, has developed an innovative platform that writes reported articles in eerily humanlike cadence. Their early work focused on niche markets, clients with repetitive storylines and loads of numeric data—sports stories, say, or financial reports. But the underlying logic that drives the process—scan a data set, detect significance, and tell a story based on facts—is powerful and vastly applicable. Wherever there is data, Narrative Science founders say, their software can generate a prose analysis that’s robust, reliable, and readable -
How open journalism helped us get better
It came up this week with this map on poverty and deprivation in London, part of our London: the data series. Recently we’ve been using the colour scale on the map below, which is a variation on the famous traffic light collection of colours – for the Guardian, this tends to go from green, meaning good, or low – up to red, meaning bad or high. It’s used by map makers and newspaper designers all the time. But is it any good?
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Read work of all Pulitzer Prizes awards
Columbia University has named its 2012 Pulitzer Prize winners. Huffington Post and Politico each won their first Pulitzers, for national reporting and editorial cartooning, respectively. The New York Times won two awards, and the Philadelphia Inquirer won for Public Service after a difficult year. The Associated Press won for an investigation into NYPD practices. Below is a list of the winners and finalists with links to their honored work and their own coverage of their victories.
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E. B. White on the Responsibility and Role of the Writer
What is the author’s debt to society and how does he repay it?
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Today, I’m headed to Columbia to take part in a symposium on the future of journalism—a subject that feels at once on some great cusp and under the weight of a myriad conflicting pressures. It prompted me to revisit one of my all-time favorite Paris Review interviews, a 1969 conversation, in which the great George Plimpton and sidekick Frank H. Crowther interview E. B. White. White has previously voiced strong opinions on the free press and, of course, the architecture of language, but here he shares some timeless yet strikingly timely insights on the role and the responsibility of the writer:
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
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Agreed: Journalism is the Best Job Ever
Last week journalists got some pretty disparaging news – journalists had one of the worst jobs in country. In fact, according to CareerCast.com, only four jobs are worse that being a journalist – oil rig worker, enlisted military soldier, dairy farmer, and lumberjack.
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Long hours, bad pay, stressful deadlines – these were all reasons that put journalism near the bottom of the list but these I’m willing to make a bet that 98.9 percent of journalists knew these things before penning that first news story. If you became a journalist for fame and fortune, then you’re going to be miserable.
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Giuseppi Logan’s Second Chance
Beautiful writing and story by JOHN LELAND
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For more than 30 years after some pioneering albums, Giuseppi Logan was one of jazz’s missing persons, impaired by drugs and mental illness. Read more -
The Journalism Movies Post
For starters, what is a journalism movie? Is it a movie about journalism, like All The President’s Men, or would a journalist character be enough, as is the case with Superman? Then there’s the question of films like Capote or The Help, which don’t meet the former criteria, but have elements one could argue are representative of professional journalism. Would these films be worthy? Read more
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