Rana Sweis – Journalist, Media Researcher and Arab Reporter - Amman Jordan - Middle East

Interview With Global Thinkers Forum

rana — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:26:57 +0000

· When did you start Leaders of Tomorrow?
Dr. Sami Hourani founded Leaders of Tomorrow in 2007 when its first activity took place, a three-day conference “The Jordanian Society: Between East and West, Past and Future” that was inaugurated by His Excellency Prince Hassan bin Talal. It encouraged youth from every governorate in Jordan to think critically about social and political issues in their own communities and urged them to take action. Our youth-led team started to organize conferences, workshops and exchanges for youth the following two years, and slowly began to grow in its activities and capacity. In 2009 we took the step to establish an office to work from, and worked hard to institutionalize the organization to what it has become now with full-time staff, dedicated volunteers and interns, and a large network across the Arab region.

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Interview: New media, new roles in Arab Spring

rana — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:35:58 +0000

New media and new roles in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, conversation with Rana F. Sweis
Jessica Carter – Mideast Flashpoints – 20/4/2012

Media, business and societies: a platform for change, held in Rome on April 15-16, 2012. Sweis is a freelance journalist for the New York Times (Global Edition) and the lead researcher in Jordan for the Open Society Institute – sponsored Mapping Digital Media study. We spoke about the changing role of the media in the ever-changing Arab region.
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App of the week for journalists

rana — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:18:40 +0000

Byword, a great text editor for iPhone/iPad.
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

rana — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 01:39:38 +0000

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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Jordanian Vote Reform Vexes Brotherhood

rana — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:00:13 +0000

AMMAN — For Osama Hasoun, 23, protesting has become a weekly affair. Nearly every Friday afternoon, he prays at Amman’s popular Grand Husseini Mosque. Afterward, he carefully folds his prayer mat, puts on his black shoes and blends into the crowd.

Revolutions that began last year in Tunisia and spread across the region also sparked protests and strikes in countries like Jordan. Opposition groups have called for comprehensive political reform and greater popular representation but mostly stop short of demanding the ouster of the regime.

In an effort to respond to these pressures, the Jordanian government recently submitted a draft of a new election law to Parliament after appointing a national dialogue committee to overhaul the system. Once the new law is passed, elections are expected to take place by the end of this year. How the campaign unfolds will be a key test of whether the government is serious about reform.

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Investigative video news channel to launch on YouTube

rana — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:05:56 +0000

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

rana — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:04:50 +0000

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

A Chicago start-up developed software that writes

rana — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:03:01 +0000

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.
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

rana — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:00:58 +0000

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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2012 Regional Edward R. Murrow Award Winners

rana — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:58:37 +0000

2012 Regional Edward R. Murrow Award Winners
The Radio Television Digital News Association has been honoring outstanding achievements in electronic journalism with the Edward R. Murrow Awards since 1971. Murrow’s pursuit of excellence in journalism embodies the spirit of the awards that carry his name. Murrow Award recipients demonstrate the spirit of excellence that Edward R. Murrow made a standard for the broadcast news profession.
Listen to the winning entries

Read work of all Pulitzer Prizes awards

rana — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:52:02 +0000

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

rana — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:46:47 +0000

What is the author’s debt to society and how does he repay it?
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

rana — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:45:18 +0000

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.
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

rana — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:35:18 +0000

Beautiful writing and story by JOHN LELAND
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

Lessons From Ants to Grasp Humanity

rana — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:32:09 +0000

The biologist Edward O. Wilson has a new book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” and it is already prompting sharp criticism from fellow scientists. Read more

The Journalism Movies Post

rana — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:15:56 +0000

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

One in three young Arab women jobless – survey

rana — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:13:44 +0000

One in three young Arab women are unemployed in the Middle East, compared with eight out of 10 young men, a new study has found.
The research, which surveyed 7,670 young adults aged 23 to 29 across 22 Arab countries, said women in the region continue to be held back by cultural and constitutional constraints, despite many being well-educated.
The findings are based on a new Silatech index report ‘Workforce Participation Linked to Wellbeing Differences Among Young Arab Women,’ which examines reasons behind young women’s workforce participation.
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The Land of Broken Promises

rana — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:12:11 +0000

In 1958, Baghdad was featured in Time magazine—not as a hotbed of revolutionary, civil or sectarian strife, but for its ambitious plans for the world’s most famous architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, to recapture through their modern buildings the city’s former glory.
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Slide Show: In the Caves of the Nuba

rana — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:09:49 +0000

The Nuba people of southern Sudan live among a series of stone massifs west of the Blue Nile. It is said that there are ninety-nine tribes, with scores of languages between them—but they are culturally united. Nubans regard themselves as the descendants of the Nubians, the most ancient indigenous people of the region. They have been fighting the Islamist military regime in Khartoum off and on for three decades. The first war, as they call it, ended after a 2005 U.N.-brokered peace agreement, and, after a referendum, statehood for South Sudan. The Nuba were left out of the independence deal. War broke out again soon after.

UK galleries join Google Art Project’s virtual tours

rana — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:07:32 +0000

Google, the company that has already made it possible to explore our planet from above and discover cities street-by-street, has announced a global expansion of its Art Project site, which allows users to go on a cultural grand tour without ever leaving their computer.
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