Frontline Club bloggers
Assad: Western idealism and Eastern autocracy
“I would be more pessimistic if I had to rewrite the last sentences,” said Christophe Ayad, co-director of Syria: Assad’s Twilight.
Putin, corruption and the Magnitsky case
It’s not easy to hear of how Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed.
Nominations open for One World Media awards
I recently spent a very enjoyable night in the pub with some friends who work in international media, one of them works for One World Media http://oneworldmedia.org.uk/ A really interesting organisation (which I was a bit embarrassed to admit I didn’t know much about) which offers scholarships to UK students wanting to report on the […]
MSF aid workers shot in Somalia
Associated Press is reporting that two people working for the aid group, Médecins Sans Frontières, have been shot in Mogadishu. At least one person is believed to have been killed. The incident is reportedly related to an internal staffing issue – AP quoted MSF worker Ahmed Ali, who claimed that a recently fired employee was responsible […]
General Richards: The media “frequently draw the wrong conclusion” on Afghanistan
The Chief of the Defence Staff gave an annual lecture to the Royal United Services Institute last night. General Sir David Richards spoke broadly about the global environment, the response of the armed forces and particular strategic challenges. He argued that Britain’s main challenge was economic and emphasised the cultivation of strategic alliances to compensate […]
Five links from 2011: ‘Twitter’
I am picking out a few of the more interesting links from my 2011 delicious bookmarks. On Monday, I selected five from my ‘war reporting’ tag. Today, I’ve selected another five from among the bookmarks I labelled ‘Twitter’ in my delicious account. Enjoy! 1. ‘Visualising the New Arab Mind‘ Computational historian Kovas Boguta visualises the Twitter influence […]
Five links from 2011: ‘War Reporting’
This year I bookmarked at least 530 links on delicious. I know that because I try to tag each bookmark by year – I’m three hundred or so links down on last year’s total of 854. Seeing as we’re coming to the end of the year I thought I’d pick out a few of the […]
BBC Azeri: Reflections on the Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict
The BBC’s Azerbaijani Service has published a gallery of my photographs taken in the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh in 1994. Over 25,000 people were killed in the war waged in the early 1990s and a million forced to flee their homes. Since a ceasefire agreement was signed in 1994 attempts to mediate a […]
Sahara reporters
I’m really impressed by this journalist website ‘Sahara Reporters’ – http://saharareporters.com – having heard their founder Omoyele Sowore speaking recently on UK media. They’re a Nigerian news website based in the US who focus on citizen journalism and getting ordinary people to write and create reports about issues such as corruption and bad political management. […]
Russian blogger arrested after post-election protests
Russian blogger and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has been arrested after participating in post-election protests in Moscow against the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The BBC has a good profile of Navalny which explains how his Livejournal blog gained traction for exposing corruption: "The popularity of his blog allowed him to start mobilising internet users to take an active part in […]
hopes and fears for Durban
It’s been hard journalistically to generate much excitement about the climate change talks currently taking place in Durban, South Africa. Even the name is a complete put-off – COP17 – I suppose it was meant to be catchy… but the acronym stands for the achingly dull ‘Conference of Parties 17’. Yes, that’s the seventeenth time world leaders have […]
lessons from Tunisia?
It’s generally agreed that the Tunisian elections went well – the results have been accepted, as has the moderate Islamist party En-nahda’s new power on the political scene. The process has been praised both within the country, and by international democracy monitoring bodies. I’m currently writing an article for BBC Focus on Africa magazine about what […]
Twitter memorial for members of the Canadian Forces
The Ottawa Citizen has started a memorial Twitter account for members of the Canadian Forces who have lost their lives in conflict. The account will tweet the name of one service member at 11 minutes past every hour. The name is chosen at random by a computer from a list of more than 119,000 Canadians killed […]
Tunisian journalism
I recently returned from a great trip to Tunisia to report on the country’s first democratic election. I had many fascinating discussions there with journalists about the challenges of working in a new system. Over super-powered coffee in the hundreds of smart cafes on the central Avenue Habib Bourguiba, I met journalists from independent agencies, Radio 6 Tunis, La Presse and […]
Time to fly a kite for Afghanistan’s future
The glass encrusted string of a cheap paper kite sliced chunks of flesh out of my fingers when I tried Afghanistan’s national sport on a recent windy Friday in Kabul. Like much of what goes on in Afghanistan, kite flying is complex and violent. In what is essentially a fight to the death, the aim […]
BBC Editor says he was advised to pull journalists from Libya by Foreign Office
On the eve of the fall of Sirte, the BBC’s World News Editor has revealed that the Foreign Office “strongly recommended” to broadcasters that they pull their journalists out of Libya prior to the start of NATO’s bombing campaign. Speaking at yesterday evening’s Frontline Club event on the pressures of reporting conflict, Jon Williams said […]
RSF sets up in Tunisia
I’m currently in Tunis, reporting on the upcoming elections for an assembly which will be charged with writing a new constitution following January’s Jasmine Revolution http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15137787 I’m pleased to see that Reporters Sans Frontieres have been able to open a permanent office in Tunis to support journalists during the transition to democracy. For years Tunisia was […]
Notes on ‘Libya and the Arab Spring’ at the Media Society
So yesterday I tried to fit too many things at too many different places into one day and ended up being late for the Media Society event on reporting Libya and the ‘Arab Spring’. But here are a few incomplete notes on the panel discussion… 1. BBC vs Sky News reporting of Tripoli I think […]
Afghanistan: once again the saddest place on earth
The siege of Qala-I-Jangi on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif in late November 2001 resulted in one of the most horrific war atrocities of the modern age. The massacre raised questions about the commitment of Afghanistan’s new rulers and their international sponsors to the rule of law, and cemented General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s reputation as a […]
Mogadishu Bomb
Yet again brutal and senseless carnage has been wreaked on innocent Somali people, already facing the arduous task of staying alive in what surely must be the worst country on earth. At least seventy people were killed when a car bomb exploded in Mogadishu – suspected to have been planted by the Islamist militant group […]
Reporting the Arab Spring: the mirage of the ‘authentic voice’
I’m breaking the radio silence on the blog to post the introduction to my latest book chapter for Mirage in the Desert: Reporting the Arab Spring. (Not to be confused with Mirage in the Dessert…that is something entirely different.) My chapter uses the case of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog, (a hoax which purported […]
Euro crisis and Africa
I’ve just had a fascinating discussion with the chief economist of the African Development Bank about the impact the eurozone crisis may have on Africa. It’s a very popular question right now, and Mthuli Ncube is hoping that his optimism is well-placed. In brief, according to Ncube, Africa should be ok as long as economic […]
Have you heard of 9/11?
By now, I’ll guess we’ve all heard pretty much enough about 9/11, but if you didn’t catch a glimpse of the short film I made, entitled "Have you Heard of 9/11?", the link below is to the version that aired on PBS Newshour recently. Similar short edits also aired on Channel Four News in […]
last thought on Niger and Gadaffi
Little did I know Niger was going to be thrown into the headlines as much as it was last week when a lone French military source quoted by Reuters suggested that Colonel Gadaffi may be planning his escape route across the vast, unpoliced desert border between Libya, Niger and Algeria. I’d deliberately chosen Niger for […]
Ten years after 9/11, from pre-emptive attack to liberal interventionism
I was on a train in northwest China, from Urumqi, provincial capital of Xinjiang, to the oasis town of Kashgar when the atrocities of 9-11 happened ten years ago. The region borders largely Islamic Central Asia — including Pakistan and Afghanistan — and is the homeland of China’s ethnic Uighur Muslims. On the dot of […]
Just returned from meeting journalists in Niger
The future seems bright for the Nigerien media. Local media are flourishing – there are around 230 radio stations (many of them community radio stations funded by donor money), four TV channels and about 100 newspapers. The advent of democracy (Mahamadou Issoufou was elected in a peaceful poll in February this year), has enshrined gains […]
Full results: Frontline Club phone hacking survey
In late July Frontline Club asked its members to share their thoughts on the ongoing phone hacking scandal. The resulting survey showed that there was broad agreement on a range of issues – from opposition to statutory regulation of the press, to the role of investigative journalism and the need for a new code of […]
Libya: Reporting the advance on Tripoli
Rebel forces have jubilantly entered the Libyan capital Tripoli, although fighting still continues in several parts of the city. For a round up of the latest news check out this list on the Small Wars Journal website. Here are a few articles that have caught my eye relevant to the reporting of the rebel advance. […]
What is the role of investigative journalism?
In late July, Frontline Club launched a survey prompted by the fallout of the ongoing phone hacking scandal. The full results have now been published, and can be found here. As part of the survey, we asked people to tell us what they thought was the role of investigative journalism. The excellent responses, a cross […]
Frontline Club phone hacking survey
Frontline Club asked its members in July to share their thoughts on the ongoing phone hacking scandal. The results, detailed below, make for interesting reading. They show that, of those who have responded to the survey so far, there is broad agreement on a range of issues – from opposition to statutory regulation, to the […]