News
Why Tet Matters
Stanley Karnow, who wrote “Vietnam: A History” and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1991, talks about the Vietnam War in the Washington Independent. As Vietnamese people prepare for Tet and the year of the rat this coming Thursday, Karnow compares the conflict to the present day situation in Iraq, I sensed that […]
The day I became a journalist
As BBC foreign correspondet Kim Ghattas prepares to move to a new posting in Washigton D.C. On BBC radio’s From Our Own Correspondent show she talks about her upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war and of how, at thirteen years old, she decided to become a journalist, I still remember the day I decided […]
The flak jacket in her wardrobe
[video:brightcove:1399286156] Foreign Correspondent of the year, Frontline club member and regular feature on this blog, Christina Lamb, spoke last week about her life as a foreign correspondent and her new book, Small wars permitting. You can watch the whole talk by clicking the video above.
NAFTA Protestors Bring the Country to the City: Video
Yesterday hundreds of tractors and thousands of people from rural Mexico came to Mexico City to protest against the lifting of trade restrictions on agricultural commodities like corn, rice and oats. The farmers say lifting these restrictions will put them out of work, because they won’t be able to compete with powerful U.S. agri-businesses, and […]
Filmstar Bárbara Mori gets Ugly: Video
Mexican actress Bárbara Mori wants to be more than a pretty face, and she has the fake buck teeth and fat suit to prove it. The Los Angeles Times covered her new movie launch, and we provided the video interview to match. Please see here for the story and here for the video.
Mexican Farmers Hit the Streets of Mexico City to Protest NAFTA
Pictures from yesterday’s protest in Mexico City – more details to come.
Colombians mobilize.
Millions of Colombians are expected to take to the streets on Monday in a protest march organized by several young Colombians on Facebook. The country’s main squares and thoroughfares will be filled with marchers dressed in white by midday. Joining Colombians, the march organizers say they have over 200,000 people signed up to simultaneously march […]
Help save Pervez Kambaksh
Blogging at The Guardian, Roy Greenslade points to a petition at The Independent newspaper to help save the journalist Pervez Kambaksh who has been sentenced to death in Kabul. His “crime” was something I do every single day and don’t give a second thought to – downloading material from the internet. Roy adds, I have […]
Conflict blogging
iConflict is a new website set to launch this month. According to comments from one of the founders of the site, Jason Haber, on the DigiDave blog, the time is right for a citizen-generated war reporting website, Unlike other social media news sites, ours is very focused. We aren’t covering Britney Spears, we aren’t covering […]
Mapping BBC Foreign correspondents
Oliver at the Journalism.co.uk blog points to an interactive map – or “Google mashup” – of BBC Foreign correspondents, stringers and bureaus around the world. Click the map above to explore the locations and people. Now, if we could get a “conflict map” and lay it over the top of this map we might be […]
A night on the road
The truck’s ‘extrication kit’ included shovels and a jack to deal with the mud; tools and spares for the Japanese diesel engine; and documents, cigarettes and whisky to ease our way through military checkpoints. We flew an identifying flag and had called the relevant field commanders before leaving. We were carrying supplies for a hospital […]
Think Balkans, not Rwanda
Picture originaly uploaded by DEMOSH The last thing a massive news organisation should do is inflame an already volatile situation by using inflamatory words and phrases with deep historical significance. This is, I hope, why almost all of the mainstream media reporting on the current situation in Kenya has tended to steer clear of the […]
“I am here to take you to the airport”
In today’s Washington Post, freelance reporter Nicholas Schmidle talks about the dangers of reporting from Pakistan and how he was forced to leave, The police came for me on a cold, rainy Tuesday night last month. They stood in front of my home in Islamabad, four men with hoods pulled over their heads in the […]
Risks to ethnic press in America
The San Francisco Chronicle highlights a Committee for the Protection of journalists report that states since 1976, 11 of the 13 journalists killed in the United States in apparent retaliation for their reporting worked for the ethnic press, “It’s exactly that kind of person who covers the local community in a grassroots level who is […]
“I would never do it again”
Filmmaker Mike Shiley says he’d never do it again. The filmmaker, who quit his job and faked an ABC press pass before infiltrating Iraq, won awards for his documentary Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories. This week he spoke at a screening and Q&A at Temple University in Philadelphia. During the event a number of attendees […]
Alaa Abdul Kareem buried in Najaf
Alaa Abdul Kareem, who was killed on Tuesday when a bomb went off on the road between Balad and Samarra, was buried in Najaf yesterday. Kareem had been working for the TV station, Al Furat. Asad Khadhim, Chief Correspondent for the station, talked to the New York Times about his funeral, Mr. Kareem was married […]
Maddening Martha
Variety magazine is less than impressed with a new play called The Maddening Truth that portrays the life of the famous war correspondent Martha Gellhorn who died in 1998. Martha is particularly well known for her eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Civil War, the devastation at Dachau, and the American bombing of Vietnam, As modern […]
Mohammed Al-Aarabid discusses his arrest in Gaza
Reporters Without Borders talks to Mohammed Al-Aarabid about his recent arrest in the Gaza Strip. Al-Aarabid is a cameraman with the French news agency Blue Press. He was arrested at his home in Gaza on 27 January 2008. After interogation in a detention centre he was released on 29 January, “They asked me if I […]
Watch the birdie
[video:youtube:iFFK655bbEU] A TV news reporter in Canada gets more than he bargained for when reporting on an infestation of Canadian Brown Finches. This is one reporter with a nose (and mouth) for a story…
Tlatelolco Memorial Exhibition – why now?
There is something odd about entering a modern, brilliantly choreographed and beautifully presented exhibition created in memory of one of the darkest episodes in a country’s modern history. Odd because the tragedy of Tlatelolco, depicted in such rich and excellently executed multi-media form here at at Mexico City’s Centro Cultural Universitario, has yet to be […]
No more Mr. Nice Guy
[video:youtube:o1OQ3warWkU] Talking on The Book Show, club member and seeming regular on this blog, John Simpson talks about his attitude to reporting, particularly war reporting, and how it has changed in recent years, A man that drops a bomb from 16,000 feet. The man or woman that straps explosives around him or herself and goes […]
Infotainment
Writing in The Long Term View, a publication of the Massachusetts School of Law Michelle Pulaski, professor of communications art at Pace University, Pleasantville, N.Y. drums out the now standard – “The media didn’t do its job in the run up to the Iraq war” – line. She describes the nightvision footage as having a […]
Media independence in Mexico?
The concept of media independence in Mexico is complex. Much of the media is financially dependent on the Government, therefore those media that are considered ‘independent’ are those that do not rely on the state for the lion’s share of their income. The concept of independence in terms of editorial objectivity is another issue, but […]
Philip Jones Griffiths – Vietnam Trilogy
You can now watch the event here. Philip Jones Griffiths is widely considered to be one of the greatest war photographers of the twentieth century. He presented pictures from his trilogy of Vietnam books at the club last week. I was there and it was a fascinating talk. One of those talks where you don’t […]
A soldier in Helmand
I’m very pleased to announce the latest addition to the From the Frontline blog stable – the Soldier’s Blog. This is the blog of an anonymous Danish soldier about to deploy to Helmand province in Afghanistan. He’ll be blogging about the daily life of a soldier before and during deployment. He hopes to be able […]
Bleasdale on the BBC
Frontline member and photojournalist, Marcus Bleasdale, is interviewed by Chris Vallance from BBC Radio 5 Live’s Pods and blogs show. You can listen the download here. Marcus talks about his work in the Democratic Republic of Congo and his use of multimedia. His is the second interview slot on the show. Incidentally, Chris showed up […]
The Kabul yeti
Jean MacKenzie at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting looks forward to heading down to Helmand for one reason and one reason alone – the weather, You know you’ve hit rock bottom when a trip to Helmand is a step up. But as I boarded the little Beechcraft this morning and set off from […]
I’m not Trevor
It appears BBC World Affairs Editor and Frontline club member, John Simpson, gets mistaken for all kinds of other media folk. Int eh February issue of High Life Magazine, John tells readers he is often mistaken for Sir David Attenborough. But, it doesn’t end there, ‘In Britain, I’m also occasionally mistaken for Jon Snow, though […]
No room at the inn
Reporting on the Gaza problem from Rafah in Egypt. NBC News Producer Charlene Gubash, tells us how it is for her Palestinian colleagues, On Saturday, hotels were ordered to turn away Palestinian guests. Our Palestinian colleague was forced to spend a cold night in the car because the hotel refused to accept him. “I am […]
Media Guardian Innovation Awards
Stepping in for Vaughan here…. and have crossposted on the Frontline blog…. Here’s some great news. Club founder and journalist whizz of the old school, Vaughan Smith, is up for a gong at the inaugural Media Guardian Innovation Awards, or MEGAs, for his live blogging, video reports, twittering and picture taking from the frontline on […]
