MSM: The Next Generation

Blogging here has been light in the past week because I’ve been extraordinarily busy helping launch Metrovox.co.uk, a web site produced by students on the postgraduate international journalism course at City University in London.

I designed the site and the underlying database and content management application, and have spent much of the past week dealing with the many inevitable gremlins we discovered in its first week of operation. I’m bracing myself for another week of 12-hour days.

In addition to material produced by its own staff, the web site is publishing stories produced by other students for two newspapers, the midmarket London Planet and the broadsheet London Globe. This gives us a large talent pool to draw on. Here are some highlights to keep you busy while this blog is on semi-hiatus:

• Globe editor Gill Murdoch looks at how post-traumatic stress disorder affects Northern Ireland paramilitaries and the difficulty they have getting treatment.
• Spencer Anderson about how construction work for the 2008 Beijing Olympics has left thousands of people homeless.
• The extremely over-qualified editor-in-chief of Metrovox, Ali Amar (who also runs Morocco’s Le Journal Hebdomadaire), snooped around the allegedly reformed Finsbury Park Mosque — and had a run-in with the police for his trouble. The Finsbury Park story hasn’t been published yet, but earlier in the week, Amar wrote a piece about Kuwaiti suffragettes.
• Lucie Tvaruzkova interviews Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech.
• Ruth Hetherington conducts interviews with holders of odd jobs in London, including a 23-year-old Brazillian who holds a sign on Oxford Street, sometimes for nine hours on end.
• Indians around the world are outraged by the Indian government’s decision that the country’s first Formula 1 driver can’t display a design based on the Indian flag on his helmet, writes Rashi Khilnani.

Rashi also reviewed the Afghan Kitchen restaurant in Islington, where you really should go to eat. The pumpkin is amazing.