News from across the Pond
Kevin Sites in the Hot ZoneFreelance broadcast journalist
Kevin Sites became a lightning rod for controversy back in November
2004 when he captured footage of a U.S. marine shooting an Iraqi inside
a mosque in Falluja.
Now he’s taken his experience and has turned it into a “solo journalist” project at
Yahoo.
The
Guardian had this report on Sites reporting on
The Hot Zone.
Now
Sites and his team produce Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, a year-long
odyssey to try and cover every conflict in the world. Each week the
website carries a mixture of video, photography and text to tell the
stories inside war-ravaged or politically disputed areas. Almost
halfway through the project now, he has covered Somalia, Iran, Lebanon,
Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.
Although Sites
operates as a "sojo" - solo journalist - there are three more team
members based in Yahoo's media HQ in Los Angeles, who help edit and
choose material. The group operates independently, picking their own
assignments and publishing their own material. It is certainly a new
kind of project, and from a new kind of media organisation. The
free-ranging concept appealed because it contrasted so sharply with the
mindset which dominates American network news.
"We feel that
foreign coverage is incredibly important," he says. "Americans,
especially, are uninformed about these things - but that's the
challenge. The conventional wisdom in the US media is that people
aren't interested in foreign news."The failures of ‘calendar journalism’Columnist Brenda Powers offers
this mea culpa on the media neglect in the wake of the 25th anniversary of Ireland’s Stardust disco tragedy.
Excerpts from The Sunday Times piece:
In
the mid-1980s I was not long out of college, a young freelance
journalist working for the Irish Press. Unlike the other newspapers,
the Press paid a shift rate for “markings”, single assignments such as
protest marches or council meetings. The one marking you didn’t want
was the Stardust Relatives Committee meetings.
...Being marked
down to cover the Stardust Relatives Committee was a real drag, though.
It meant getting a couple of buses to chilly, grey halls in bleak
landscapes on the northside. It meant sitting in the cold for hours
listening to the same angry, sad, defeated people endlessly pursuing
their hopeless cause.
You’d trudge back to Burgh Quay, write up
the committee’s latest demands and know that, at best, your piece would
end up as a couple of paragraphs on the bottom of a left-hand page.***
They slipped from the headlines because we all got bored with the story.
But
now it’s 25 years later and the imperatives of “calendar journalism”
require us to revisit these people. There are a couple of generations
who never learnt the details of the Stardust disaster. We can watch and
read and listen with our children or younger friends and say, “ I
remember all that.” Imagine it, 48 young people, average age 19, burnt
to death at a St Valentine’s disco.
Imagine the heartbreak in
all those homes and the financial hardship in households where those
youngsters’ wages helped make ends meet. Imagine that some of the fire
doors were locked, and yet nobody went to prison.
Imagine that
the owner of the Stardust got hundreds of thousands of pounds in
compensation, and yet the families of the dead and maimed had to fight
tooth and nail to get a few miserable thousand each. Imagine that smart
lawyers and cynical politicians bought them off so cheaply, knowing
they were poor.Editors, be gentle with usBritish freelancer Susan Wallace reaches out to feature editors in the hopes they will “be gentle with me.”
Here’s her piece from the Press Gazette.
The
one thing we all want in our incestuous, merry-go-round uncommunicative
communication culture, feature editors and fairy elephant freelances
alike, is a brilliant article for the readers and a better future. The
reward for good work should be more work, preferably grief-free — and
I'll sprinkle some magic glitter over that!Kurt Schork Memorial AwardsThe
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
announces the Kurt Schork Memorial Awards, honoring the contributions
of freelance journalists covering foreign news and reporters from the
developing world and countries in transition.
Two $5,000
prizes are awarded each year, one to a local reporter covering local
stories in a developing country or nation in transition, and the other
to a freelance journalist covering international news. The stories can
focus on conflict, human-rights concerns, cross-border issues, or any
other issue of controversy in a particular country or region. Nominees
will be judged on the quality of writing and investigative effort, and
on the level of courage and resourcefulness demonstrated in producing
the stories.
Underwritten by the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund and
Reuters, and administered by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting,
the prizes honour Kurt Schork, an American freelance journalist who was
killed in Sierra Leone in May 2000 while on assignment for Reuters.
The application deadline for the 2006 awards is 1 June 2006