journalism
Access Denied: Twitter, Iran and embedding journalists in online culture
You can now watch the event here. The Iranian Election was the moment when Twitter “exploded into our consciousness as a really powerful newsgathering tool” Adrian Wells told the Frontline Club earlier this week. Sky’s Foreign Editor was discussing how media organisations cover ‘news black holes’ with Richard Sambrook, Head of Global News at the […]
Michael Yon to end Afghanistan embeds and go it alone
Independent war reporter Michael Yon has not so much burnt his military embed bridges as completely obliterated them. He claims that the Ministry of Defence has been trying to have him removed from the area of Regional Command (South) and from Thursday he will be reporting unilaterally from Helmand province. Yon was annoyed that his […]
Choose the best photojournalism of the decade
Photo District News is seeking an answer one of journalism’s great subjective questions: what are the best news photographs of the current decade? PDN’s 30th anniversary issue will honor your choice of the most memorable and influential photographs of the last decade in every genre. Readers’ selections will be reproduced in the January issue of PDN and on our Web […]
The front line in Afghanistan
The BBC’s Ian Pannell and cameraman Fred Scott are on the front line in Helmand. The British troops they film are taking part in Operation Panther’s Claw, which has cost the lives of seven British soldiers in the last week. I picked this up via Dr Ken Payne on the Kings of War blog, […]
Former captive warns of reporting risks on return to Beirut
Terry Anderson, former hostage and AP bureau chief in Beirut, returned to Lebanon this week to give a talk on the ‘global hazards of reporting’ at the Issam Fares Centre. Anderson, who was kidnapped in 1985 and held for six years and nine months, spoke eloquently for over an hour about his kidnapping, the dangers […]
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, […]
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 […]
Few left to tell the story
These past few days have been littered with tales of misery coming out of Somalia. On June 7, a Radio Shabelle journalist shot dead, the fifth journalist killed this year. Ahmed Omar Hashi, was also shot but survived. Hashi called Frontline blogger David Axe from his hospital bed asking for help. David is trying to […]
Live tonight: MPs expenses – a triumph for journalism?
Tonight we’ll be discussing the ongoing MP Expenses scandal in the UK and whether or not the story was a triumph of journalism or the chequebook. Roy Greenslade chairs the discussion tonight 8 June and we start at 7:30pm GMT. As usual, if you can’t make it to the Club in person you can […]
FRONTLINE: A Broadsheet
Finally we have relaunched our old Club newsletter to a proper broadsheet which is available to all. Subscription is only £15/year (4 issues). FRONTLINE: A BROADSHEET aims to be a high-quality, quarterly publication, in some ways radical; in others resurrecting traditions lost from the British market. FRONTLINE will address major events and themes in international […]
Frontline Broadsheet is coming
The quarterly Frontline Broadsheet is coming. It’s high quality. It’s printed – and yes I do mean on paper, we’re doing this the old fashioned way – and it’s subscription only. To find out more send an email to [email protected] with the word BROADSHEET in the subject header. For blog readers and Twitter followers, here’s […]
Media140: Tweeting from the field
Media140 brought together twitterers (and maybe some people who aren’t on Twitter) to talk about the impact of everyone’s favourite 140 character tool on news journalism. Using Twitter to do journalism We learnt what most people know if they’ve been using Twitter to do any sort of journalism. Twitter is pretty darn useful for monitoring […]
Frontline bloggers at Media140
Tomorrow, I’ll be heading along to Media140. It’s a conference that will look at the impact of Twitter and other social media tools on news coverage and journalistic practice. I seem to be pretty interested in this sort of stuff. After all, I’ve written a few things on Twitter – its use as a reporting […]
Live tonight – Peter Beaumont on war reporting
Peter Beaumont drops by the Frontline Club tonight to discuss his latest book – The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict – and his life spent reporting from the frontlines of many wars. The Observer Foreign Affairs Editor has had a change of heart of late, see below, and it will be interesting […]
Live: World Press Freedom Day 2009 debate
YOU CAN NOW WATCH THE EVENT HERE. To mark World Press Freedom Day, we’ll be debating the state of press freedom at the Frontline Club this morning. We start at 10am GMT May 1. The debate will cumulate in an audience vote on the motion “Governments at war are winning the battle of controlling the […]
How not to read a newspaper
Writing on the Foreign Policy blog Thomas E. Ricks suggests we should start reading newspapers like reporters. His simple, but misguided, point is that we should simply follow the writers we like, look for the bylines we know and love, read those articles and pretty much ignore the rest of the paper. Here’s his take, […]
#G20 – Twitter dominates mainstream media coverage
I’m feeling rather overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information on the G20 protests and I’m just sitting and watching. But maybe that’s my problem – there is so much to watch. I’m currently waiting for 2,383 queued tweets on a #G20 search of Twitterfall (and later I realised that I need to keep it […]
‘Two-bit blogging’: an example
A couple of bits and pieces I picked up today. Literally – a couple: 1. Noah Shachtman, editor of the Danger Room at Wired, is (almost) accused of being a ‘two-bit blogger’ by a spokesman for Donald Rumsfeld: "I think if you’re going to accuse Rumsfeld of ‘blowing the war in Afghanistan’ and do it […]
Live tonight – Is the press accountable enough?
Online video chat by Ustream Tonight we discuss press standards, self-regulation and public trust as we ask the question: Is the press accountable enough? We start at 7:45pm GMT/11.45am PST and if you can’t make it to the club in person we’ll be streaming it live above, on the club events page and on the […]
Fixing the foreign correspondent web
How does the Internet affect the work of a foreign correspondent? That’s the question Andrew Stroehlein, a journalist and Communications Director for the International Crisis Group, discusses on the Reuters AlertNet blog. Andrew draws together a lot of current thinking and makes the point that it’s often impractical for a foreign correspondent to work effectively […]
Stop Press
My favorite all-time movie moment about journalism takes place at the end of the Humphrey Bogart 1952 film Deadline USA. Bogart as the grizzled editor defies a gangster’s threat and order not to print a story about him. He orders the press to roll and holds the phone up so the gangster can hear it. […]
Not down, not out, not yet
What with reports of newspapers being in survival mode, websites like Paper Cuts twisting the blade, Twitter channels like The Media is Dying dancing on the grave and research that reads like an obituary, any sane journalist must be thinking of shutting up shop, going home and seriously mulling their next move – out of […]
Somali Journo Needs Your Help
Increasingly, my reporting career is reader-supported. In the past year, readers of my blogs have ponied up nearly $3,500 to send me to Chad, Kenya and, soon, Nigeria to report on war and humanitarian crises. For that, I’m grateful. I’m equally grateful for my growing audience. My personal blog War Is Boring now attracts more […]
George Polk Awards announced
The 60th George Polk Awards were announced yesterday. The awards remember George Polk, the CBS reporter who killed covering the civil war in Greece in 1949. The foreign correspondent awards are as as follows, Two New York Times correspondents will share the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Husband-and-wife team Barry Bearak and Celia W. […]
John D. McHugh – Combat Outpost
John D. McHugh drops us a line to tell us that his latest report from Afghanistan for The Guardian is up on the site. John has been filing multimedia reports from the frontline in Helmand over the past year. As he says in his email, This is without doubt the most difficult and dangerous place […]
Attacks on the Press
The Committee to protect journalists launched Attacks on the Press 2008 today. The CPJ will be holding a press conference at the United Nations later to publicize the report. You can watch the livestream on the UN website at 9.30am EST Tuesday 10 February. Taking part will be, Joel Simon, CPJ Executive Director, Paul Steiger, […]
The Fixers Fund
If you’ve nipped into the Frontline Club recently you might have noticed the Fixers Fund gift donation envelopes, on the stairs, at the bar and in the forum. We’ve also put together a short video explaining more about the fund and how it was started following the murder of Ajmal Naqshbandi. Afghan journalist and fixer […]
The Decline of the Foreign Correspondent
Princeton University recently held a panel discussion on the Decline of the Foreign Correspondent. They talk about the “dramatic shift of traditional media away from foreign reporting and the growth of web-based citizen journalists and the effect on coverage of international news and human rights issues” Taking part are, Loren Jenkins, Foreign Editor, National Public […]
For the truth to get out, journalists have to get in
Journalists still can’t get into Gaza. The Israeli government have banned media access to the war torn strip. The result for foreign reporters, on the 11th day of this war, is that hundreds of them sit at border points waiting to be granted access by Israeli authorities. The ban flies in the face of a […]
Press Freedom report 2008
Reporters sans frontières release the 2008 Press Freedom report today. While the figures are depressing they are better than 2007, “The figures may be lower than last year’s but this should not mask the fact that intimidation and censorship have become more widespread, including in the west, and the most authoritarian governments have been taking […]