“The hardest, bitterest thing about being a journalist is that you see events as they unfold. You see history as it might still be changed, wars as they might still be stopped. Seen in close-up, everything looks more complex, more ambiguous, and sometimes the more you know, the less you understand. But if you talk, and talk and talk with as many people as you can, if you stay in the world’s veins, in the end you always get an idea of what’s happening.”
– Remembering journalist Anthony Shadid
I frequently encounter Eritreans living safely in the West, with political asylum, who feel they can’t even “like” social-media posts that are critical of the regime back home. Instead they prefer privately writing or calling the individual whose post they wanted to react to. They fear the regime is tapping everyone’s social media account.
Read more from Global Voices.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
–
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (via wordsnquotes)
So fitting. CPJ denied UN ECOSOC accreditation today after 4 years of
Kafka-esqe bureaucratic limbo.
What does this mean? The NGO Committee of the United Nations voted today to deny us consultative status with the Economic Social Council (ECOSOC). Without such status, we are unable to access U.N. bodies and processes, notably the Human Rights Council in Geneva, where accredited NGOs can deliver a counter-narrative to states. During today’s vote, six members voted in favor of CPJ’s application, 10 voted against CPJ, and three abstained. The full list of countries that voted against us is here.
“You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.”
– James Baldwin
Ahmed Abu al-Hamza, “Software” as he was known by his friends, stood behind the camera on November 6 as a gunman explained how rebel forces took Tel Sukayk, a strategic hilltop north of Hama, from government forces. Suddenly the camera’s sound recorder picked up the faint thud of a mortar shell firing in the distance. A few seconds of confusion then turned to horror as the shell exploded right in front of the camera, killing Abu al-Hamza and the rebel fighter and injuring several others.
Abu al-Hamza’s friends shared the last moments captured on camera in a graphic YouTube video that garnered more than 1.7 million views. Copies of the video also spread quickly, some by accounts that confused the rebel fighter for Abu al-Hamza. Abu al-Hamza’s colleagues and news outlet told CPJ he had just joined the local pro-opposition SMART News Agency for a try-out period and he died filming for SMART. But it turns out the other accounts were not so wrong after all, as his colleagues also said Abu al-Hamza was a member of a media center of a local affiliate of Ahrar al-Sham, a powerful rebel group with ties to Al-Qaeda.
Abu al-Hamza was one of 90 cases researched by CPJ of journalists who reportedly died while covering the Syrian conflict this year
Read more.
Image:
ZAC BAILLIE / AFP
think-progress:
“Due to some urgent matters that I need to handle and that aren’t to be revealed to the public, I have made way own way back to the mainland…” read a handwritten letter faxed into a bookstore in Hong Kong last Wednesday. “It might take a bit of time. My current situation is very well. All is normal.”
Above:
The site where the body of journalist Evany José Metzker was discovered on May 18, 2015, five days after he disappeared in Brazil’s Jequitinhonha valley. Photo:
Valseque Bomfim
He called himself the Owl of the Valley. Journalist Evany José Metzker, 67, wanted to see everything that happened in this backwater town situated amid the banana plantations and clandestine gold mines of Brazil’s interior.
Straddling a major highway where truck robberies and child prostitution are routine, Padre Paraíso has 18,000 inhabitants, many of whom are destitute. In recent years drug gangs have taken hold of the town. “Here, they’d kill you for two cents,” muttered one policeman.
On May 13 Metzker, who was on a reporting trip from his home 73 miles away, disappeared. Five days later, his beheaded corpse was found by the side of a secluded dirt track.
Read the full story at AJAM.
writeworld:
How does Susan Orlean find her profile subjects? How does Malcolm Gladwell get his sources to speak with him? How does Sarah Stillman bring the characters in her stories to life? Thanks to the Longform podcast, we listened in on conversations with writers for The New Yorker as they spilled their secrets for outstanding reporting and storytelling.
Read More →
