College of Journalism Feed

Filling the gaps in foreign coverage

2010-11-04T10:53:31+00:00

Ethan Zuckerman is about as far away from a big-city newspaper editor as it gets. He lives in rural Massachusetts, is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and co-founded a site in 2004 that's dedicated to reaching the parts old media doesn't reach: Global Voices.

The site is a sprawling, dynamic collection of reports from around the world, concentrating on stories and issues that get scant attention in the rest of the media.

I met Zuckerman (above) at an appropriate venue: the Open Video Conference in New York - where bloggers and international new media advocates gathered to eat pizza and talk about the future.

Inspired by working in Ghana, Zuckerman helped found Global Voices after quantifying a "systematic bias" in foreign coverage from the world's main newsgatherers, including the BBC.

While his conclusion that rich and powerful countries get a lot more coverage than poor, developing countries is self-evident, Global Voices is a unique response to the status quo.

As he puts it: "We need journalism to be vastly more than just what we say we want; we need journalism to be perpetually exposing us to a wider range of ideas and provocations."

Global Voices now has a presence in more than a hundred countries, combining the work of professional journalists and enthusiastic amateurs. It's not intended to rival or replace the New York Times, but operates as an informal, multimedia supplement.

Zuckerman's work highlights the extremes that exist in the mainstream media - especially in the US, where a viewer can go for days without being served up a single in-depth foreign story on the network news. But now they can click on Global Voices for in-depth coverage on the Ecuadorian police strike - in Spanish ...

These are the web pages shown in the film:

Global Voices homepage

Global Voices contributors

Global Voices languages page

Ethan Zuckerman page on Global Voices

Ethan's news mapping paper, 2003

Global Voices manifesto

Bulgaria: Internet Discussions about Nazism

Get involved

Video: the New Competition

2010-02-05T15:43:46+00:00

Graham Holliday, the blogger and social media expert, gave an insightful talk about the internet boom in the former war-torn African state of Rwanda.

Graham spoke about how people outside the mainstream media are exploring new ways of publishing and distributing content - using social networking tools such as Afrigator - an African news aggregator that pulls together stories from media sources across the continent - and Gatorpeeps, which is basically Twitter Africa-style.

Since moving to Rwanda in 2009, Graham has created Kigali Wire, a weblog dedicated to all things Rwandan.

As high-speed internet connectivity improves across Rwanda and Africa at large, its role in how Africans communicate with each other and their global neighbours will be immeasurable.

Is it the weather, or is it the climate?

2010-01-06T15:11:46+00:00

Snow arrives at the start of a year which the Met Office predicts will be the hottest on record. Its press release of 10 December contained the following startling claims:

- Global temperature for 2010 is expected to be 14.58Â°C, the warmest on record.

- 2009 is expected to be the fifth-warmest year in the instrumental record that dates back to 1850.

- Our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010-2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far - 1998.

Is any of this relevant to stories about stranded motorists, gritting and delayed flights?

If record temperatures are just one sign of climate disruption, then potentially it is.

Reporting the snow story without making a connection to some bigger picture is unusual: a story about a stabbing in a school is put in the context of knife crime statistics; the closure of a factory is related to economic growth or unemployment; the death of soldiers in Afghanistan is linked to military strategy or foreign policy.

But British weather still seems to live in a world of its own, its vagaries seen as Acts of God, unrelated to the issues discussed exhaustively in coverage of the Copenhagen Summit only a couple of weeks ago.

Media connections between weather and climate have been sensitive for a while. A few years ago, Dr Heidi Cullen, a well-qualified former presenter for the Weather Channel in the US, got into hot water over her view that meteorologists on television should see their job as putting weather news into the context of climate change.

She wrote in a blog: "If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS [American Meteorological Society] shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval." To her detractors, making the connection between weather and climate was 'dragging politics into the weather forecast'.

Where do our weather experts stand on this?

The Met Office isn't an independent business: it's a Trading Fund of the Ministry of Defence, whose governing body is chaired by a minister, Kevan Jones. So, on its attitude to the relationship between weather and climate, it is answerable to the government.

On its website, Climate Change gets second billing only to Weather. But the two are still presented in separate, apparently water-tight compartments.

As for the BBC, its online page today (above) includes what looks like it might be an attempt to connect weather stories with climate change - Richard Black's piece 'Why so cold' - but it turns out to be a discussion of something called the Arctic Oscillation Index. On claims by climate researchers that changes in the Index over the past 30 years are attributable to man-made global warming, Black concludes, doubtfully, "you would have to say the jury is definitely still out".

Climate conference: Shukman briefing

2009-11-03T14:35:05+00:00

If you need a quick briefing on the main issues at the Copenhagen conference , try this video from David Shukman.

Click here for more information from the United Nations.

Anna Politkovskaya three years on

2009-10-07T09:42:17+00:00

It's three years since Russian campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered. Her killers have yet to be brought to trial.

The general secretary of Reporters Without Borders was refused a visa to travel to Russia - Jean-FranÃ§ois Julliard had intended to take part in a news conference in Moscow to mark the third anniversary.

Amnesty has renewed its campaign to persuade the Russian authorities to take an interest in the case.

Twenty-two journalists have been killed in Russia since the start of the decade.

Reuters and Iraq

2009-10-05T15:09:01+00:00

This is a good watch and multimedia experience. OK, so it's also good PR and marketing on the part of Reuters ... but you can forgive them.

It's what it says on the tin - five years of the Iraq war ... with some exceptional photography and short, telling soundbites from journalists and support staff in Baghdad.

The opening slideshow, which uses both still and moving images, gives a good account of what has been the deadliest conflict for journalists.

But there's more: this phototimeline, for example:

And a selection of maps showing, amongst other things, how many journalists have died in the conflict: