Frontline Club bloggers
Strategic Communications: Morning session summary
…so there’s been a bit of a delay getting the necessary wireless access, but we’re good to go now. We’re also under the Chatham House Rule so observations will be general rather than specific. This morning we’ve been hearing about how the new media landscape has profound implications for the area of strategic […]
Strategic communications in post-conflict countries
I’ll soon be heading into London for a two-day conference where participants will be discussing strategic communications from various organisational perspectives – military, international, humanitarian, and media. On today’s agenda we have: – A key note from Nik Gowing on the ‘new tyranny of shifting information power in crises‘. – A discussion between General Sir […]
From Baku to Strasbourg: 40,000-euro-worth idiosyncrasies
According to Azeri Press Agency, Heydar Aliyev Foundation, named after a former KGB strongman and communist party chief turned president, and which operates in and from the Republic of Azerbaijan, a secular Shia state, has donated €40,000 to Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg. The foundation is headed by the First Lady of Azerbaijan who […]
Armenia: Political prisoners freed, reported live via mobile
It was for times such as this that I decided to follow the example of fellow Frontline Club blogger Guy Degen by getting myself a Nokia N82. After sitting at the Yerevan Opera uploading images taken with a Nikon DSLR, but transferred to my phone’s memory card so I could ftp them via free wi-fi at […]
Who’s Got Your Back?
Newspapers are going to the wall and freelancers in all industries are struggling as the ranks of the self-employed are swollen by the newly de-salaried. Not a good time to be a freelance journalist. There seems to be more and more competition at a time when newsdesks have less and less money to spend on […]
Presidential wrestling in UB
Shouldn’t all presidential inauguration celebrations include a wrestling competition? Last Thursday Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj was sworn in as Mongolia’s new President. Along with a military parade in Ulan Bator’s Sukhbaatar Square opposite Parliament, there was a concert staged at the Cultural Palace. But sports fans in Mongolia were not disappointed. A wrestling competition to mark the […]
Narco wars season starts this week
The Frontline Club starts the Narco Wars season on the War on Drugs on June 23rd. The season is packed with films, discussions and events focussed on the topic of drugs from Colombia to Afghanistan and into South East Asia. Here’s what’s coming up, – June 23 – Photojournalist Jason P. Howe talks drugs in […]
Maziar Bahari arrested in Tehran
Maziar Bahari envoyé par Khanjar. – Explorez des lieux exotiques en vidéo. Newsweek reporter, film maker and Frontline Club regular Maziar Bahari has been detained in Tehran. Maziar has been living in the Islamic Republic for the past ten years. Foreign media have been barred from covering the post election protests and many journalists, including […]
Rising Confusion in Pakistan
The news rang on the cell phone of a beat reporter – Security agencies had notified police headquarters that more than one hundred buildings in Lahore were under security threat. A friend, who also works as the bureau chief for another news channel, and I were both sipping our evening chai at a cozy lounge […]
Cafe Tacuba Uncut
For the hardcore Cafe Tacuba fans out there, here is the uncut material from the 15-minute interview that I did with two of the band members – Emmanuel "Meme" del Real Díaz and Enrique ‘Quique’ Rangel Arroyo – last Saturday night, just before they played a sold-out gig to more than 55,000 fans. […]
Rumours are not confined to Twitter
The Washington Post appears to have inaccurately reported that "the Twitter interface does not support the use of Farsi". The ‘fact’ that Twitter didn’t support Farsi was news to me because I have been watching tweets come into my Twitter feed in Farsi. (Fairly useless from my point of view because I can’t read them, […]
An Afghan fixer in Sweden
Naqeebulla Sherzad is an Afghan fixer. He worked with Ajmal Naskhbandi, the fixer beheaded by the Taliban in 2007, and who inspired the formation of the Frontline Fixer’s Fund – 100% of funds raised are given to the families of fixers killed or injured while working with international media – After being told his name […]
Meanwhile in Mongolia…
It had to be exactly 12:06 pm. Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj set the time of his swearing-in ceremony to become the fourth President of Mongolia in a symbolic nod to the year Genghis Khan was proclaimed ruler of the Mongol Empire. Dressed in a gold-coloured traditional deel, Elbegdorj took the oath of office today at Parliament in […]
Going beyond the hashtag to follow Iran
Over on Slate Jack Shafer is concerned that his "cognitive colander isn’t big enough to strain out Iran information" on Twitter. For the last couple of days I’ve been tracking what has been going on in Iran and suffering from a similar problem. But hopefully this post might help. To begin with I fired up […]
More jump ship from The News
Only five of the original 14 people rehired by Grupo Mac to man The News, Mexico City’s struggling English-language newspaper, remain at the title. As we reported a couple of weeks ago, Brian Rausch was the most recent editor of the newspaper following the dismissal of Malcolm Beith – who was the first to sit […]
Nearly 10,000 migrant kidnappings in Mexico in 6 months
You may recall that last year, I published this video about a group of Honduran mothers who came to Mexico looking for their missing family members and friends. Since then, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission has a carried out it’s own investigation into the problems Central and Latin American migrants encounter when they […]
Jumex Collection owner says architectural choice not `malinchismo’
You might remember last week we reported that the contemporary art collection, Coleccion Jumex, had appointed a British architectural firm, David Chipperfield Architects, to build its hot new gallery space closer to the Mexico City action. At the time of writing the dispatch, we were also curious to know why owner Eugenio Lopez Alonso, heir […]
Armenia’s bleak pictures of the past
As mentioned in two previous posts, I’ve been spending the past week and a half fixing for the BBC and photographing for The National. With all that work now having finished last Friday, the first article by journalist Daniel Bardsley accompanied by my portrait of the subject of his piece on Armenia-Turkey relations and […]
Iran Election: links on media coverage 2
The same deal as yesterday but today instead: Al Jazeera English Journalist uses Twitter to get commentary on Iran. BBC Changing the website to green was NOT a gesture of support to the protesters. Director of Global News says UGC offers authenticity to BBC coverage. Have Your Say team interact with Twitterer. Jon […]
Microwaving the Frog in Darfur
Here’s how one of my aid worker friends put it: "It’s like the boiling frog. If you had said to us at the start of the Darfur emergency that this is where we would end up, then no-one would have accepted it. But Khartoum made things worse bit by bit, almost imperceptibly until we ended […]
The Queen’s Birthday
So, once a year Nairobi society gets together to celebrate the Queen’s birthday. As far as I know no-one bothers to do this sort of thing in Britain but as Kenya aspires to be Britain of the 1950s this is quite a big deal. The only reason for attending is to see which innappropriate speaker […]
How Cafe Tacuba sprained my ankle
This is probably the least exciting location from which I have filed a dispatch. My sofa, in my third-floor apartment, my snowball-like foot propped up on a couple of cushions as I look out onto the cloudy Mexico City panorama this morning. What happened? Well, it’s all Cafe Tacuba’s fault really. I interviewed two of […]
Iran Election: links on media coverage
This is a list of links I’ve been collecting on media coverage of the Iran election protests. It’s far from complete but it’s a start at least and hopefully it helps identify some of the main themes that are emerging. To that end, I’ve tried to group together links, although you’ll notice that there […]
Student protest outside Iranian Embassy in Yerevan
Following Friday’s disputed presidential election in Iran and clashes on the streets in Armenia’s southern neighbour which have left several people dead, Iranian students studying in Yerevan again protested outside their Embassy. Alerted to the small protest which eventually attracted about 50 people by Twitter, it also provided another opportunity to put the Nokia […]
Temperature Rises, Anger Boils Over
There have been worrying signs in recent days that anti-government protests in Tbilisi – now in their third consecutive month – have the potential to descend into civil unrest. Protesters have been blocking several streets in the Georgian capital around the clock with imitation prison cells, which are intended to highlight the alleged authoritarianism of […]
Live tonight – Pakistan turmoil
Tonight we discuss the roots of turmoil in Pakistan at the Frontline Club. As usual we start at 7pm GMT/11am PST. If you can’t make it to the Club in person, please join us online on the Frontline Club live channel, on this blog or on the Club events page. Feel free to embed the […]
Back from Karabakh
After several days fixing for the BBC for a report on Armenia-Turkey relations and the conflict with Azerbaijan over the breakaway territory of Nagorny Karabakh, a photo commission from The National newspaper saw me return to the same topics no sooner had that work finished. There’s much to be said about both subjects and […]
What’s the Point of Advocacy?
Signs of weariness among some of the campaigners who first brought Darfur to the world’s attention. After six years of advocacy, of campaigning for an end to the conflict, there’s a moment of soul-searching. Nick Kristof, columnist for the New York Times, wrote the first article that catapulted the crisis into public consciousness. Now he […]
Where is the rain?
"Where is the rain?" That’s the question on everyone’s lips these days in Phnom Penh. The full-on rainy season was supposed to have started a month ago. Normally every day like clockwork, a downpour would start in the late afternoon, sometimes lasting an hour, sometimes lasting late into the night. An additional morning rain also […]
Radio reporter held in Iraq
Jasim al-Kinani, a radio reporter with Al-Ahd network, was detained in Iraq on Wednesday following an explosion in the southern city of al-Bathaa in Dhi Qar province. The reporter is still being held by local security forces. The Journalistic Freedoms Observatory put out a statement in Arabic, Kinani detained today by security forces in Dhi […]
