(London, November 16, 2008) – The UK foreign secretary, David Miliband, should use his visit to Syria to raise human rights concerns, Human Rights Watch said today. In particular, Miliband should urge the Syrian government to release activists detained solely for exercising freedom of expression and association.
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"Acting local thinking globally. We believe that the medium of animation lends itself well to unlocking fresh and uniquely African creativity, allowing African stories to be told in a manner that appeals to a global audiences but is nuanced by the experiences of the continent." from the website of the animation house,...
Founded by Claude Grunitzky TRACE Magazine focuses on 'transcultural styles + ideas'.‘Transculturalism’ is a term which Claude uses to describe the increasing prevalence of individuals who “transcend their initial culture, in order to explore, examine and infiltrate foreign cultures”-Wikipedia
Claude Grunitzky photo courtesy of the...
Georgia dropped almost sixty spots in the latest media freedom report by Reporters Without Borders - going down from the 66th to the 120th place in the rankings. This could be one the larger drops in one year that the index has seen.
The conflict with Russia is mentioned as a key reason for Georgia’s poor performance in the report. It certainly contributed to the fall with the dangers to journalists in conflicts, but restrictions placed on media in Georgia have not helped either and, perhaps, have been the driving force. For example, when anti-government demonstrations were sweeping the country last year, the president simply shut down the independent media.
Earlier this month, this NY Times article painted a bleak picture of media freedom on Georgia. An ombudsman...
As my colleague Alex Shkolnikov noted earlier, the Russian press has been relatively mum on the topic of the financial maelstrom enveloping Russian markets. Now news comes from the Financial Times that the first retail bank has experienced a run on deposits.
Globex, a mid-sized retail bank with assets of $4bn (€2.95bn, £2.32bn), is the first Russian bank to experience a run on deposits during the crisis. It lost 13 per cent of its deposits last month, according to Maxim Raskosnov, an analyst at Renaissance capital, and a further 15 per cent this month according to Emilya Alieva, Globex’s vice-president.
At least a dozen other Russian banks have reported a sharp rise in withdrawals and account closures.
Although Prime Minister Putin has directed his government to inject over $84...
Hash reports:Kelele, the African Bloggers Conference, was announced today at Barcamp Africa. That event has an incredible amount of energy and enthusiasm behind it, and it makes the perfect segue to the next big African community event: Kelele! This event was born out of connections made at TED Global in Tanzania last year, when 25+ bloggers from around Africa were brought face-to-face for the...
I was in the Hague earlier this week, participating in an anti-corruption conference, and was able to follow the financial crisis by checking in whenever possible with CNN and BBC on TV and the Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune - all that was easily available around me. It may not have been much, but enough. The coverage was certainly extensive, with much time and column space devoted to discussions on problems, solutions, finger-pointing, and other related issues.
One thing that was hard not to notice while in Europe is that the media there spent a considerable amount of time covering their own financial issues, just as in the US much focus is on domestic implications of the crisis as well.
A few days before that, however, I was watching a Russian...
Polymeme, my favorite source for news that’s not all Palin, all the time, led me to a fascinating set of photos this morning. They’re from Ilakaka, Madagascar, a town that’s grown from little more than a truck stop into a wild west mining town in about a decade. Ilakaka is currently the source of roughly 50% of the world’s sapphire, and it’s a fascinating case study in what happens when something very valuable can be pulled out of the ground without much capital investment - you get a gold rush.
The main street of Ilakaka, October 2008. Photo by Roberto Schmidt, AFP
What I appreciated about the Globe story - and, as it turns out, several other stories I found on Ilakaka, is that most of the authors avoided, “this is terrible, something must be...
If you’ve been to a tech conference in the past five years, there’s a good chance you’ve also been to an “unconference“. Unconferences work to break down the barrier between speakers and audience, inviting all attendees to participate in shaping the program, offering sessions or contributing to the discussion that’s taking place. Done well - Foo Camp, the various Bar Camps, blog unconferences - they’re a great way to tap the expertise of everyone in the room, to ensure that discussions focus on topics people care about. Done badly, they’re chaotic and frustrating, dominated by the loud and self-confident (I’m both, and I’m well-aware that I need to be moderated.)
So I approached Mastermundo, a day-long conference...
It’s difficult to know exactly what is happening in the north of Sri Lanka these days (media representatives are not allowed into the conflict-riddled war zone), but it’s clear that recent police actions in Colombo could have potentially disastrous effects – in an area rather open to international scrutiny at the moment. As reported by The Economist and the BBC, civilians who have arrived from the northern [Tamil-majority] areas to the [Sinhalese-majority] capital and surrounding areas in the past five years have, over the past week, been required to register with the police, supposedly in an effort to combat the suicide attacks that have become tragically more frequent of late.
The “census,” as it is being called, could of course be just that – a simple tally of how many...
Talk one of four at PICNIC was a small seminar for the European Journalism Center. Their part of the PICNIC experience was hosted in a geodesic dome tent within the “club” - the noisy public space where attendees are eating, drinking and having fun. So it felt a bit like giving a seminar in the anteroom of a dance club… not the easiest experience.
The talk after mine came from the founder of Zemanta, Jure Cuhalev, an interesting plugin for bloggers. You install Zemanta on your browser, it watches what you’re writing as you author a blogpost, and it sends your text to a server, which does natural language processing analysis, and suggests videos, photos, hyperlinks and tags for your content. The media suggestions appear in a window, and you can drag and...
Aaron Koblin is a data visualization geek. He believes that “data systems tell stories about our lives”, and he’s in the business of building beautiful, poetic images that tell those stories.
Some of his earliest works looked at mapping georgraphy in terms of the use of infrastructures. The image above is a map of North America drawn by tracing the paths of planes in flight. As this map moves through time, you can see the East Coast wake up and get on the road, followed by the midwest and into the West. “You’re able to intuit the system without knowledge of any geography.” He’s built similar maps of traffic accidents, of email flow, and a visualization of data coming into and out of New York City called the New York Talk Exchange....
Salim Amin has some big shoes to fill. His father, Mohamed Amin, is widely regarded as one of Africa’s finest photojournalists. He covered Ethiopian famine, the fall of Idi Amin and of Mengistu, and recorded some of the darkest - and most important - stories from the continent. He died in 1996 while trying to stop the hijacking of a plane bound from Ethiopia to Kenya. In 2006, Salim honored his father’s memory with an award-winning biographical film. His next project aims to honor his father’s work in a different way.
Mohamed Amin
Amin is the founder of A24, a new media company that features video from producers around the African continent. When Amin spoke at last year’s TED Africa conference, he was describing the project as a continent-wide news...
TED Speaker Salim Amin launches A24 media:
“A24 Media is Africa’s first online delivery site for material from journalists, African broadcasters and NGO’s from around the Continent. A24 Media’s business model ensures that all contributors receive a wide and previously unknown exposure to their content, thereby generating sustainable and generous revenues from the sale of their stories on a 60:40...
My friend and colleague Persephone Miel presented her recent research as part of the Media Re:public project, a research effort sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation to study the role of citizen media in the larger universe of news and journalism.
Persephone explains that this effort follows a 2005 conference at Berkman, organized by Rebecca MacKinnon (friend and co-founder of Global Voices) titled Blogging, Journalism and Credibility. The conclusion of that conference, she reminds us, was that “Bloggers versus journalists is dead.”
That said, Persephone’s skeptical about citizen media, coming from a long history of work in professional media, especially with Internews, a nonprofit that focuses on building and strengthening professional media. When she was...
It's no secret that Whole Earth, both the catalogs and the magazine, were huge influences on Worldchanging. Indeed, Stewart Brand has been one of our heroes.
Plenty has a sort of oral history of the WEC up on its site. I contributed a few quotes, but the real pay-offs are the lines from some of the early adopters:
Kevin Kelly: The catalog’s voice was a breakthrough. There wasn’t a style sheet; they left in most of the spelling and grammar errors. The WEC also had a gossip section. It was about the people who wrote the catalog. Brand was the first person to make gossip a legitimate topic.
Richard Wurman: A West Coast catalog for hippies that won the National Book Award [in 1972, in the Contemporary Affairs category]? It was a paradigm shift in information distribution. In...
I mentioned a few posts back that I found individual sentences in Paul Starr’s brilliant “Creation of the Media” worth remembering and exploring later. One sentence that stuck with me was his observation that, despite Thomas Edison’s role in creating a popularizing moving pictures, the US wasn’t initially the world’s biggest producer of movies: “In 1907, two-thirds of the films released in the United States were imported from Europe; Pathé-Frères alone supplied one-third of all movies shown in America, more than any domestic firm.”
It’s not that US filmmakers were late to the technology - they were simply late in understanding their audience. In the early 20th century, the US was a nation of immigrants, to a greater degree...
GDP up, incomes down. Why bother reporting about GDP at all?
This just cheeses me off. Yesterday, the US government released figures showing that GDP grew at an annualized pace of 3.3%. The implicit message: Yippee, we're not in a recession!
The press, of course, ate it up. AP crowed: "The U.S. economy grew in the spring at a 3.3 percent pace. The best gross domestic product results in nearly a year beat Wall Street's expectations." The Voice of America's headline trumpeted: "US Economy Growing at Faster Rate Than Predicted." Even the Canadian press got into the act: "US economy shows vigour in Q2."
But today, the other shoe dropped. Even though GDP was up last quarter, personal income declined in July. ...
White African profiles Pamoja a new Advertising network:
Started by Joshua Wanyama (of AfricanPath) and Benin Mwangi (of Cheetah Index), it’s an ad network created to serve advertisers trying looking for a one-stop-shop for publishers in Africa, or that reach Africans in the diaspora...[continue...
Significant growth in violence in Afghanistan has been capturing the headlines over the past few weeks. But somewhat beneath the surface, another type of attacks has become everpresent in the country — attacks on media. These attacks are carried out by government agencies unhappy with reporting. Interesting is the government’s position in regards to media, especially when reports clash with national security interests:
Some officials argue that these bounds are crossed when critical reporting weakens the central government and strengthens the Taliban. They point out that given present security conditions reporters also have an obligation to protect the national interest.
“The media does not reflect the achievements of the government,” Sadeq Mudaber, the...
Academy Press a printing pioneer, started "...with four-unit Web-offset presses..." the company has since grown to include subsidiaries such as West African book publishers, Lithotec,Academy Press Business Forms.Their product range includes:
-Periodicals
-Unit Set Forms
-Instructional...
There’s nothing like the term “cyberwar” to capture a reader’s attention. For those who grew up on “Wargames”, “Sneakers” or William Gibson novels, the term conjures up images of heroic hackers in shadowy basements, frantically tapping on keyboards in a life and death struggle against the enemy on the other side of the glowing CRT screen.
It’s a vision that was compelling to senior people in the US Air Force, including former USAF Secretary Michael Wynne, who was fired earlier this year over the scandal of mishandled nuclear weapons. Before his departure, Wynne launched the Air Forces’s “Cyberspace Command” with a television ad that portrayed the Air Force as the defender of the Pentagon against an onslaught...
A media group in continuous operation since 1846 may not be the company you should look to for advice on the future of media. Or maybe they should: the Associated Press is both doing well in a digital age (when they’re not making boneheaded moves like pretending that fair use doesn’t exist) and looking towards the future, trying to figure out its role in the media ecosystem. And they’re carrying out some very interesting research to determine just what their role is going forwards.
The transformation of newspapers into 24/7 digital newsrooms has been something of a boon for AP. The fact that the newswires constantly churn out new content means that they’ve become one of the main sources for news on newspaper websites. Denis Wu of Boston University did a...
Fusion Capital offers SME focused financial solutions.
Derrick Ashong launches Ashong Ventures.
The Economist applauds Endeavor's success in spreading the gospel of entrepreneurship.
CopperNet leads in the provision of information technology services.
Founded by Baba Jibrin Adamu, Inetworks Canada believes strongly in the provision of low-cost communications and...
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A couple of weeks back, I was wondering what functions “we” - which could mean “media geeks,” “people who care about journalism” or “people who believe that informed citizens are important in a democracy” - should try to save from daily newspapers. This doesn’t neccesarily mean saving newspapers from fiscal collapse… though I have to admit, I’m tempted to see if a group of people could raise a million bucks and buy the New Haven Register and hundreds of other smaller papers - the Journal Register Company is down 99% percent in the past two years.
What it may mean is building digital institutions that fulfill some of the journalistic functions newspapers are abandoning. That was one of the motivations behind building...
One of the best parts of this gathering at Microsoft is not the cool new toys coming from Microsoft research, but the ideas presented by nine design schools who’ve been invited to the event. In a two-hour session this afternoon, the teams present their work for critique by a group of MS and other design experts.
Ennea, a project from students at the Eindhoven University of Technology is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a long time, developed during a six week design class. The students focused on an interesting problem - the problems incoming Dutch high-school students have in building socialization skills. The Dutch education system doesn’t have middle schools, so students go directly from an elementary school to high school, a transition that can be...
Storm Media Group founded by Obi Asika is a multimedia,film production and broadcast facilitation company. The groups components include:
-StormInteractive
-IBST Media
-Storm Records
Read related LadyBrille interview with Obi Asika...
There’s nothing like a meeting on the future of journalism to get you concerned about the future of journalism. While there are some brilliant and exciting ideas discussed at conferences like the Knight Foundation-sponsored meeting I attended yesterday, there’s also a very clear sense that some of the very basic questions surrounding the future of journalism remain unanswered. The biggest of those questions seems to be, “Who’s going to pay for it?” and I’ve not heard any very compelling new answers to the question lately.
Unfortunately, there’s still at least two strands of conversation that seem impossible to avoid at these events, one cyberskeptic and one tech-utopian. The cyberskeptic strand is insistent on reminding us that blogging...
The venerable High Country News -- one of the leaders in North American rural lands reporting for a couple decades now -- has a new website, designed by our friends at ONE Northwest, and it pretty much rocks. Go there and you'll learn some things about the big open.
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Media at 9:11 AM)...
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation supports a huge range of journalistic programs, ranging from experimental efforts in community journalism to massive players in the media ecosystem like National Public Radio. 180 of their grantees are in Chicago today at a meeting hosted by Knight designed to build connections between grantees and encourage cross-fertilization of projects. (The Rising Voices project of Global Voices is supported by the Knight Foundation, which is why I’m here.)
It’s also an interesting opportunity to see how people in the journalism world are looking at the business and technical challenges facing the field. The opening speakers, Rosental Alves from the University of Texas and Dianne Lynch from Ithaca College offer quite a bit of disparity in...