PSST: Some Good News About Journalism for a Change?*
Journalism has never been as easy as it looks. One day in 1940s, Los Angeles newspaper reporters were riveted by a report that came crackling over the police radio. A headless torso had just been found outside the city, in a gravel pit! Competing reporters from the...
Journalism’s Latest Tech Fix: The Flying iPhone
In Africa, “journalists as a part of civil society have fallen off the radar,” according to Heather Gilberds, a Canadian media developer who works in Africa. Radio is still the most popular medium in sub-Saharan communities, she says. Africans don’t listen to radio...
INSIDE THE STRUGGLE: Fighting Racism in the USA and Europe
When our honest, contentious, eye-opening meeting was over, I was too preoccupied to post this. Here is what my colleague ended up writing about our INSIDE THE STRUGGLE conference, which was amazing....
Hacking the Refugee Crisis
The hardest thing about living in Hungary is the official government ideology of hate. Lots of people in nearby countries also embrace Orban’s intolerance toward the refugees; the Polish ambassador told me last night that 80% of Poles said they would like Orban to be...
TECH DREAMS
My friend Seth Effron in North Carolina has been handed a dream assignment: figure out how to repurpose some campus buildings to help serve the cause of good journalism. Here is my dream for his project: Create the one and only tech hub devoted to creating journalism...
More Drama in Hungary (Holocaust Report Part III)
Walking home today from an Easter Monday walk in Budapest, we unexpectedly came upon an artist, Tibor Szilagyi, trying to challenge the government's "Germany Made Us Do It" statue project in Freedom Square. Tibor wanted to protest the government's planned statue,...
All They Stand to Gain is Their Souls
Today officially marks the 70th anniversary of the Hungarian holocaust. A few Hungarian government officials will put flowers by the Danube, where hundreds of Jews were tied together and ordered to take off their shoes. Only the first and last in the line were shot,...
Assigning Blame, 70 Years After
Hungary is struggling with how to remember the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust —when 560,000 Jewish and Roma Hungarians were assembled, robbed, tortured, and executed, most in an unprecedentedly fast four-month blitz at the end of the war. The attempted genocide was...
Havel’s spirit “we must carry”
Hundreds of us gathered last Sunday night in Prague, to conjure the spirit of Vaclav Havel at the first Forum 2000 conference in 16 years that he wouldn't attend himself. Olda Czerny, who faithfully served in Havel's cabinet and ran these conferences, also died last...
The Gerbaud conversation: finding nutrition in news?
If everyone is now a journalist, thanks to mobile media tools, how can consumers create a nutritious news diet for themselves? How can they sort out what reality is captured and what is constructed and therefore presumably less authentic? This was the question we were...