A brief dispatch from San Francisco, where yesterday I spent some quality time with Loic Le Meur, Cathy Brookes and VinVin at Seesmic. As well as a quickfire exchange with users on Seesmic – some of whom are already on the Hub – Loic and I had a quick chat on Seesmic’s rooftop:
More soon on SF and LA (where I will be at the Media Re:Public conference at USC Annenberg tomorrow)…
Some of the top Kenyan bloggers have been providing compelling updates since the beginning of the election campaign – of those that I read regularly, Kenyan Pundit and Mental Acrobatics particularly stand out – and it’s worth keeping an eye on Global Voices’ Kenya Elections page. That said, we’ve been finding it difficult to track down much citizen video or audio at all from Kenya thusfar – if you come across any, or we’re missing something obvious, please let me know via the comments, or upload it to the Hub. I’ve been wondering why it’s taking time for video to emerge – is the footage out there, but just not online yet? Was it just too insecure and dangerous to film during the first few days? Here’s a by no means comprehensive scour for video, audio and photos out of Kenya in recent days…
It’s not quite clear to me whether this is related to an initiative by Media Focus on Africa, a Dutch-Kenyan NGO, equipped several reporters around the country with high-end video-enabled mobile phones – the reports on this site appear to end on 21st December, before the election.
Over at YouTube, another Kenyan online effort, Kenya Votes, conducted vox pops with ordinary Kenyans in the run-up to the elections, including this young woman expressing her fears about tribalism:
As you might expect, there’s plenty of traditional media coverage on YouTube – Kenya’s own Nation TV, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and CNN are all putting video reports and interviews online. Rocketboom’s Ruud Elmendorp has a short video report from the days before the election. Currently individual users, like YouTube newbie theweepingsoul, seem to be using news images culled from the web in homages to the photojournalists and other journalists getting images out and in pleas to end the violence.
[Slight changes below, after a second look at the project...]
For me, the 2002 series I Have A Right To… still represents a good benchmark for how the BBC’s World Service can knit together human rights resources of real and lasting value – and that others can use and build on.
Now, the World Service is celebrating its 75th Anniversary with a season of programmes, debates and chunks of participation related to freedom of speech, in an upcoming season called Free To Speak [thanks, Solana].
As usual, no one does global broadcasting quite like the World Service, with Roy Greenslade fronting a four-part radio series on the freedom of the press, for example, but the online experience feels pretty disjointed by comparison. There are elements in the online parts of the season that hold useful nuggets, however:
- A timeline of the history of broadcasting, including “media minutes” for each year, and which at the time of writing stretches up to the 1970s. There’s a lot of conflict, a lot of politics, and perhaps a bit too much of the presenter, and not enough of the actual audio, but it’s still of value, as this audio clip from 1965 shows, attesting to the power of the televised image in galvanizing the civil rights struggle in the USA…
[Originally published on Panos London's AfricaVox here.]
A day of high contrast for Ndesanjo, with the relief of finally getting down to business in Gleneagles overshadowed by the attacks on London yesterday.
[Originally published on Panos London's AfricaVox here.]
John has provoked considerable debate over on BBC Online’s pages, and I am not surprised. He’s given a fresh and candid perspective on the experiences of an African journalist covering an international summit, and today’s diary in particular shows the considerable frustrations that African journalists have to put up with in a day’s work:
[Originally published on Panos London's AfricaVox here.]
After this morning’s terror attacks on London, the atmosphere around the Gleneagles media centre changed markedly, and the tone of John’s piece for BBC Online reflects that sombre mood:
The air is now extremely gloomy up here and I am not finding the excitement and energy that I usually see with journalists.
Those from London will be worried about friends, family and colleagues, and those from abroad will perhaps be feeling cut off from the real theatre of action, even as they are appalled at the loss of lives and threats of further terror.
Like John, many of the journalists have seen the aftermath of violence and terror in their own countries, and they’re all shocked by this morning’s events, and, like John, offer their condolences to the people of London.
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