My heart’s in Accra » MSM love for the bridgebloggers
Saturday, 13 September 2008, 10:17
Ethan Zuckerman:"Two excellent articles in major American newspapers recognize the importance of bloggers and online authors in building bridges between people in different countries. If you want to understand what’s going on in other parts of the world, it helps to read not just stories about those countries, but the stories people in those countries are telling…"
The Australian: Bloggers of the world, let’s shop!
Saturday, 23 August 2008, 07:44
Online culture is thriving in almost every country I visited. The exception is Cuba … Most bloggers prefer to protest privately, anonymously or not at all … Despite their relatively small numbers and the penalties they attract, dissenting bloggers are playing havoc with the established order. According to Human Rights Watch researcher Elijah Zarwan, "bloggers have succeeded in doing something that years of standing on the street corner and shouting 'No to torture' or 'No to the interior ministry' has never managed to accomplish": putting these issues on the public agenda."
Wednesday, 18 June 2008, 14:45
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"We built our own content management system from the ground up. The site was built using PHP5 and MySQL5, on a Fedora Core OS." Includes Calais-based Semantic tagging and lots of other interesting ideas.
Wednesday, 18 June 2008, 14:31
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Some interesting features on the new Mail & Guardian site: StoryPredictor suggests articles according to reader interests. NewsSwarm shows who is viewing articles. StoryHistory utility will save articles … Articles will be integrated with Google Maps.
Thursday, 17 April 2008, 16:36
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"Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck was arrested on April 10 without any charges in Egypt for photographing a demonstration. He used his mobile phone to twitter the message “Arrested” to his 48 followers, who contacted UC Berkeley, t
Thursday, 15 November 2007, 19:42
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"In September and October this year the Mail & Guardian newspaper hit the highest circulation in its history, so clearly print is not dead – at least in Africa"
Sunday, 20 May 2007, 18:54
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Ethan Zuckerman: "My favorite example of repurposing recently is my friend Alaa’s use of Twitter to coordinate activities of activists in Egypt."
Wednesday, 9 May 2007, 10:16
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South Africa’s blogosphere is reacting to the ignorant and offensive comments of a newspaper columnist who likened bloggers generally to the Virginia Tech murderer.
Monday, 23 April 2007, 13:15
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The Economist’s online news editor "goes to Mugabeland".
The scramble for African oil: a Chinese view. [ADDED 8.1.2006] (0) Sep 26, '05
Chad journalists stage news blackout
Monday, 22 August 2005, 19:14
Journalists in Chad have begun a one-week news blackout to protest the jailing of four independent reporters by the government of President Idriss Deby.
Deby, who took power in a coup in 1990 but validated his position through elections in 1996 and 2001, sparked a wave of criticism at home and abroad in June when he pushed through constitutional changes allowing him to run for a third term in 2006.
One of the arrested journalists had written a piece criticising Deby’s constitutional changes. Previously the constitution limited presidents to two consecutive terms in office.
A number of journalists said the Deby government has become increasingly repressive towards the private media, which have been largely critical of Deby’s third-term ambitions.
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Nadjikimo Benoudjita, president of the Chadian Association of Private Newspaper Editors (AEPT), said Chadian journalists are paying the price for criticising Deby and that he hopes their strike will help rally international support to stop the government crackdown.
“We want the pressure of international opinion to seize this government,” he said.
Not that you’d notice a news blackout in the West: Chad, one of the world’s poorest countries despite being an oil exporter, is also one of the least reported on in the world.
Chad: fourth journalist jailed
Wednesday, 17 August 2005, 15:58
The central African state of Chad is one of the most under-reported countries in the world.
So what’s going on in the African country you probably haven’t heard of despite it being a petrolium-exporter that is deeply involved in the war on terror?
Well, the president recently won a referendum basically designed to install him for life and the government has been cracking down on the press.
Recently, four independent journalists have recently been jailed for “inciting hatred” — against the government.
In the most recent case, Sy Koumbo Singa Gali of L’Observateur was jailed for one year after she interviewed a government critic.
Meanwhile, the World Bank-funded oil pipeline project isn’t quite the model of transparency it was meant to be. The World Bank is very concerned about the finding of a recent report from Chad’s petrolium oversight organisation:
The report cites incidents of irregularities in transfers of funds; poor quality of, and long delays in the delivery of goods and services; and lack of competitive bidding processes, and cases of overpricing of goods and services. It also assesses that some local authorities were not informed of projects planned in locales under their administrative responsibility.
The full reports can be found here.
Underreported stories from Africa
Tuesday, 7 June 2005, 16:27
I’ve only discovered it now, nearly two months after it was published, but every blogger and journalist ought to read Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah’s amazing, rambling post about the underreported stories from Africa.
Subtitled “100 issues that the journalist in me feels the media should investigate”, the post nods at loads of interesting stories the author would like to hear more about.
I wasted some time trying to add some value by distilling it into a shorter, bullet-pointed list for the time-constrained, but it just isn’t possible (or appropriate). Read it all. If you’re short on time, scroll down and start reading at the cross-head “An African’s Perspective” That’s were the rapid-fire list of underreported stories is.
Exiled Zimbabwean newspaper launches web site
Wednesday, 23 March 2005, 16:43
Via Europhobia I see that with a little help from the Guardian’s web site, the online edition of the The Zimbabwean is now available.
To find out more about the internet-based free press in Zimbabwe and The Zimbabwean’s remarkable editor, Wilf Mbanga, check out the stories by Blessing Ruzengwe over at Metrovox.
Update: Blessing Ruzengwe also has a story about the crackdown on internet cafés in the Zimbabwean itself.
