News
Live from Zimbabwe election day
7am – Umwinsidale, Harare Arrived at the polling station, a large marquee in a field between the Redale petrol station and the local police outpost, just after 7am to find a short queue of about 10 people waiting to vote. Loitering outside was a chap wearing a yellow jerkin which read Regional Faith Observer but […]
Nation of Millionaires
For a short while today I was a billionaire. I changed US$100 at a rate of 40 million Zimbabwean dollars (ZD) to the US dollar. In Zimbabwe everyone is a millionaire some of the time. I couldn’t have changed more, even if I’d had room in my rucksack because apprehension about the outcome of tomorrow’s […]
It’s an Election… but not as we know it
Just two days before the elections in Zimbabwe, Santos still hadn’t decided which presidential candidate to vote for. “Who do you think will make the better president,” he asks, “Simba Makoni or Morgan Tsvangirai?” (He ruled out a vote for Mugabe with an emphatic sideways shake of his head and a guttural click of the […]
Breakfast in Khartoum
The coffee tastes like coffee, the croissants are flaky on the outside and soft on the inside, and the wifi is running at the speed of light. But this isn’t breakfast in Kenya – where the coffee was probably grown and which is setting itself up to be an internet hub for East Africa. This […]
Video: Mexico making peace with los emos
MexicoReporter.com headed down to Insurgentes yesterday with the Los Angeles Times to cover a kind of peace rally organised by the leftist city government following the friction between emos and other youth groups, reported earlier this week. The result was this blog post by correspondent Ken Ellingwood and myself featuring a video interview with 18-year-old […]
Virtual Vietnam Wall
The Vietnam Wall monument in Washington D.C. commemorates the lives of 58,256 American soldiers killed during the Vietnam War, or as the Vietnamese call it the American War. This week the wall goes online. Footnote.com is an interactive representation of the wall. the site seems to be having some teething problems at the moment, but […]
Dig the new breed
Interesting blog by Geofrrey Hiller that aims to bring to our attention the work of “a new breed of documentary photographers”. Each post focuses on one image from one photographer. As the blog blurb says, “Verve is a reminder of the power of the still image.” Images like the one above by Candice Feit taken […]
Back to Kurdistan
On the BBC World Service, Michael Goldfarb – author of Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam and Dying in the New Iraq – writes and talks about returning to Kurdistan five years after the outbreak of war in Iraq, Erbil, Kurdistan, northern Iraq – every foreign correspondent has one place that gets under the […]
Fake news and a lot of lousy reporting
During a talk at the University of Regina in Canada last night, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh had a go at the lousy reporting and fake news coming out of war zones today. When he’s looking for real news he turns to translations of the local press, War reporters do not have access to […]
Bush’s War
The PBS Frontline TV show puts online the two part documentary called Bush’s War. The vast multimedia report includes over 400 interviews and 175 video clips. The Producer Michael Kirk answered questions online at the Washington Post, Our focus was the war about the war. We focused on the battleground between the forces that wanted […]
Pilger gets doctored
Author, journalist and documentary film maker John Pilger will recieve an honorary doctorate at Rhodes Universtity in Grahamstown in South Africa this coming Sunday according to the Daily Dispatch, Pilger, who already has several doctorates from universities around the world, will be given the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa. “Honouring a prolific and […]
Mapping the media
Interesting wee mapping experiment that takes an image of the world and maps the number of stories written about different countries and lays it on top of the map. The results, unsurprisingly, tells us much of the planet goes unreported. Nicolas Kayser-Bril explains more, These maps allow you to grasp several media trends at a […]
Fast-track to the deadpool?
It takes nerve to launch a new citizen journalism website right now. It’s already a crowded space – shortly, I predict, to become markedly less crowded as tried-and-failed business models hit the buffers – but some opportunities surely remain. And so credit is due to iConflict.com, which launches today. It’s shtick is compartmentalising the news: […]
Independent Kosovo
Download this episode View in iTunes You can now watch the event here. Latest debate from the Frontline Club events room in Paddington, London on Independence in Kosovo is now online. The discussion includes contributions from journalist and former spokesman for the Kosova government Daut Dauti, Balkan specialist author/journalist Tim Judah, journalist Misha Glenny who […]
Wanna be a Hizballah Fighter?
Writing on the TIME blog reporter Andrew Lee Butters tells how his assistant, Rami Aysha, spoke to a few Hizballah fighters from his neighbourhood to find out how you go about becoming a Hizballah Fighter, Two important themes stick out: from the beginning, the training stresses the path to martyrdom, which is achieved through honesty, […]
Beijing bashes foreign media
After expelling the few remaining foreign journalists from Tibet last week, the Chinese government has attacked foreign media for what it sees as biased reporting. The International Herald Tribune has more, “At a time when China is promising to become more open with the world, this is a big disappointment,” said Jocelyn Ford, a freelance […]
Dodging the death toll
As the number of dead American soldiers in the Iraq war hits the 4,000 mark Katharine Zaleski at The Huffington Post scans through the American newspapers and finds that just two of the nearly 2,500 newspapers in the USA give up the front page to the dizzying death toll. Most prefer to run with stories […]
Movie ‘La Zona’ thrills with its ambiguous take on Mexico’s class divide
This brilliant directorial debut from Uruguayan-born Rodrigo Pla poses some of life’s most fundamental moral questions in a film that grips the viewer right from the start. The feature also brings to the cinema, with very little exaggeration, some of the social dynamics of Mexican society and its obstacles to justice. Set in a gated […]
Talking with the Taliban
The Globe & Mail’s Graeme Smith puts together an in depth multimedia production called Talking with the Taliban for Canada’s biggest newspaper. The piece includes 42 unedited interviews with Taliban fighters all of whom were asked the same set of questions by a researcher the newspaper sent to talk with the Taliban. Here are the […]
Bearers of bad tidings
French TV journalist Wissam Sharaf is leaving France and heading back to his native Lebanon. But, he’s not heading there for some ‘get back to my root’s’ goodness. He thinks Lebabon is “gonna move” And he’s not alone. The Los Angeles Times reports on how journalists are seen as the harbingers of doom by the […]
Getting the story – Kabul
Writing on the Reuters photographer’s blog Ahmad Masood gives a great wee bit of insight into the working life of a photographer on the Kabul beat and the process he goes through when responding to a suspected bomb, I always call another photographer, or the Reuters Television producer, to double check, and I hate to […]
David Pratt on reporting Iraq
David Pratt remembers working as a journalist in Iraq, the toll on reporters like Caroline Hawley who we blogged about earlier today, and the camaraderie that builds up when working on the frontline of history and conflict, More than anything I’ll remember the Iraq war in this way: a series of cameo moments and lives […]
Defence editor required
Recruitment agency Media Contacts runs an advert in The Guardian looking for a Defence editor. Does this sound like you? Are you an expert in defence? Then this defence editor position is exactly what you are looking for. This is a chance to use your knowledge on defence on the leading weekly title on defence. […]
The stress of war reporting
Catherine Philp writes a great piece in The Times about the personal toll of working as a journalist in Iraq. The feature outlines the dangers and the sheer psychological toll of reporting from a conflict zone that has proved the most deadly in history for journalists. The BBC’s Caroline Hawley tells of the personal toll, […]
I Hope It Was Worth It
So, 1500 people died and some 600,000 people were displaced in violence after rigged elections that denied Raila Odinga his chance to become (what his campaign promised would be) the People’s President. He never really specified exactly what the People’s President would do. But the feeling was that he would ensure the dark days of […]
‘Emos’ under attack in Mexico City, Gov tries to peacemake
The Mexico City Government called a meeting today for the coming Tuesday between the city’s ‘urban tribes’ to try to put an end to the increasing violence and animosity against emos that is currently sweeping Mexico – see Daniel Hernandez’s blog here for an excellent synopisis of the current situation. Since the first attack against […]
‘Free’ content doesn’t mean free content
I had a call from Lloyd Davis last week when BBC London wanted to use one of his video clips. You can see it on his blog here, and also here. Lloyd was happy to help but – naturally and quite rightly, in my view – he wanted payment. Not a fortune, just a fair […]
5 years on at the Frontline Club
[video:brightcove:1460747551] Not to be outdone, we here at The Frontline Club mark the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war with a discussion in the club’s event room. Two journalists who were working in Iraq at the time discuss the situation. John Burns was the New York Times Bureau Chief in Baghdad before, during and after […]
Fewer reporters in Iraq
The Press Gazette rounds up just how many British media organisations remain in Iraq. There are less British news outlets there than at anytime since the beginning of the American led invasion. The article details the number of people each bureau holds to mark the 5th anniversary since the most dangerous war ever for journalists […]
Ilyas Shurpayev killed
According to reports from Novosti Ilyas Shurpayev, a Russian television journalist, has been found dead in his apartment in the northeast of Moscow. The 32 year old was known for reporting from Russia’s North Caucasus including the republic of Daghestan, Georgia’s breakaway republic of Abkhazia and Chechnya, “According to a preliminary forensic medical examination, Ilyas […]
