(re)medios

Vivir en la frontera

2009-03-19T15:29:00.007-04:00

Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the "normal."

Gloria Anzaldúa
Borderlands/La Frontera

Foto juan23for (CC)

En la casa de las diferencias

2009-03-16T19:18:00.004-04:00

As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas -- the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Foto Yarman Jiménez tomada de Radio Feminista Internacional- FIRE.

Querido Hopper

2009-03-09T12:31:00.005-04:00

Marina camino a NYC

2009-02-23T18:20:00.005-05:00

¿De qué lado estamos los periodistas?

2009-02-01T10:38:00.005-05:00

En un inusual artículo publicado en el New York Times, el reportero Ethan Bronner revela los dilemas éticos que ha enfrentado cubriendo la guerra de Israel contra Palestina. Digo inusual, porque los reporteros generalmente no revelamos nuestras reflexiones, contradicciones, prejuicios y conflictos internos, aunque todos están claramente reflejados en nuestros artículos. Ahora que el periodismo tiene que ser una conversación para sobrevivir, los reporteros tenemos una oportunidad de ser más honestos con nuestras audiencias.

Foto CC switch_1010

Después de la tempestad no viene la calma

2009-01-23T09:28:00.008-05:00

Una vez más la Internet ha probado ser un espacio en el que es posible leer, ver y escuchar otras voces. Voces que nos cuentan otras historias. En la más reciente guerra de Israel contra Palestina se les prohibió la entrada a los periodistas a Gaza, pero no se pudieron suprimir las historias de blogueros palestinos de alrededor del mundo. La bloguera y activista Jillian C. York ha reunido una excelente lista de blogs, de personas que viven en Palestina o en otros países, que ofrecen otras historias, otras imágenes y otros sonidos de la más reciente masacre contra palestinos.

In Gaza
Gaza Strip, the Untold Story
Raising Yousuf and Noor: Diary of a Palestinian Mother
Lamentations-Gaza
Moments of Gaza
Tales to Tell
Palestine Blogs

Elementos gráficos reproducidos con la autorización de Paul Kelly.

Autorretrato Marina

2009-01-17T10:55:00.001-05:00

Volvemos

2009-01-16T10:04:00.003-05:00

Este blog comenzó para cumplir con el requisito de un curso de nuevo periodismo. Por eso hay una mezcla de posts en inglés y español. Aunque cambié el blog al español, seguirán apareciendo textos en inglés de vez en cuando. Volvemos con comentarios, chucherías, antojos, vídeos y fotos. Por ahora, la foto principal es del Cambridge inv(f)ernal en el que estoy metida. Pero eso también cambiará. Por ahora, el blog se llama (re)medios, por los medios remedios y los que no son remedios de nada, también. Pero eso también cambiará. Bienvenidas y bienvenidos.

The Fabric of Our Lives

2008-12-02T15:26:00.052-05:00

"The Internet is the fabric of our lives"

Manuel Castells*

Ingrid and Caren were able to give a voice to their lives through the use of technology. They can now be heard around the globe because of the Internet. For them, technology holds the potential for liberation.

Ingrid and Caren participated in the Women's Electronic Network Training (WENT) Digital Story Telling workshop held in Durban, South Africa, in 2007. WENT was organized by APC Africa-Women, the regional program of the Association for Progressive Communications Women's Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP), and the digital story workshop was conducted by Women'sNet, a South African feminist grassroots organization founded in 1998 that works to advance gender equality and justice through the use of technology. Their videos were posted as part of the 2007 Take Back the Tech Campaign, that runs yearly from November 25-December 10, and is organized by APC WNSP.

The videos produced by the participants contain powerful stories. They are another form of journalism that is usually ignored when we talk about "citizen journalism." These stories have been mostly abandoned by mainstream professional journalism. The Ethics Group leader of the Poynter Institute, Kelly McBride, said by e-mail that these accounts are "absolutely journalism. It's different than professional journalism, but it works. It tells a story, one that's not being told by professionals, for the most part." The Poynter Institute is a school for professional journalists based in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The focus of Women'sNet's digital storytelling project, as described in their site, "is on the story tellers' control over the medium, choice of words (narration), pictures and music so that the process is as powerful for the story teller as the end product is to the listener." They explain that:

Because Women'sNet is committed to challenging traditional approaches of developing media which appropriates women's voices, misrepresents us, and disempowers us, our approach to digital stories is one of empowerment, of women's control over their voices and stories, and respectful of process and product.

Ingrid narrates how as a child she had to dig a hole in the garden of her house to escape the brutality of seeing her mother being abused. Hers is a story of violence, generational bonds between women, survival, resistance, pain, and love. It is a raw journalistic piece that explores the complex dynamics of domestic violence from the perspective of a child who sees and lives through her mother's painful experiences, and who, as we can gather from her narrative, also is a survivor.

It is safer to be in the garden. And then I went inside again. Do you think it is a weak woman who can walk back inside?

The participants and facilitators of the WENT workshop also recorded their thoughts and experiences in a blog. While reading their posts you can almost feel the sense of euphoria that these women had after and during the workshop. Ingrid says: "What we are silent about, what we cover up and leave unspoken, festers, like a covered sore. Speaking and telling, in that process, takes the sting away, erupts the volcano beneath, and it has no power left." Isn't journalism also about uncovering, revealing, empowering the people through information? Of course there are ethical concerns surrounding citizens and the practice of journalism, as there are with professional journalism. McBride sheds light on this issue:

The biggest concerns are truth, fairness and accuracy. Although professional journalists often fall short, they are always striving for these values. Because a professional's loyalty is with her audience, she is likely to take many steps (like interviewing opposing sides of a story, multiple sources and experts) as she strives for these values. A citizen has a different loyalty and different motives for telling her own story. Often that makes it very powerful. But the downside is that a citizen story-teller speaks from a distinct point of view that can be distorting. That's not a bad thing, but it changes the landscape of information.

In the last six months, Women's Net, located in Johannesburg, South Africa, has trained 130 men, women and girls (10 to 18 year-old) in the use of technology. For their citizen journalism project they have trained more than 20 people on how to produce digital stories, blog, use the e-mail and the Internet. The organization's executive director, Sally-Jean Shackleton, explained in an e-mail interview that "Women's Net takes a three-prong approach to its work - we build capacity, while producing content and empower for networking for addressing gender inequality. I'll use the example of our Digital Stories work: We train women to use computers to tell their stories (capacity), at the end of the workshop we have developed short movies (content), this content is used to change perceptions about gender violence and advocate for change, and they are used in human rights training programmes." The most common topics covered are HIV/AIDS and violence against women. She added that this form of grassroots journalism can advance development by:

...increasing public participation in the media, making media more accountable. Increasing the diversity of voices and issues heard, and alerting citizens to problems and potential solutions.

As a part of its digital storytelling project, Women'sNet collaborated with the global network Just Associates (JASS) in the workshop called "Telling Our Stories", held in Johannesburg, South Africa, last May. Esther Sheehama, a participant from Namibia, recounts in a video how she was sterilized without her consent after having her child because she was HIV positive. The participants' videos were uploaded to YouTube. This is Esther's story:

Women'sNet offers a wealth of information in their site, such as tips for non-governmental organizations on technological planning, research on technology, news concerning gender issues, information on HIV/AIDS, violence against women, the economy, education, reproductive health, and facts about their campaigns and advocacy projects. Members of the staff have blogs, and they have a group on Flickr.

The South African feminist scholar Helen Moffett argued in an e-mail interview that once the "foundation stones are in place" -which are access to technology, literacy, and training- the use of communication technologies by marginalized groups can be very powerful.

...there is something very heady about having an 'instant voice', and ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) offer this. It's also very hard to censor email and Internet communications, which means (for instance) that the only completely 'free' speech in Zimbabwe at present is via the Internet. Pictures and other information and data can be downloaded and communicated very swiftly, and this applies to any oppressed community experiencing extreme strictures on freedom of speech and information.

Erika Smith, communications coordinator of the APC WNSP and one of the founders of Mexico's local Internet service provider LaNeta dedicated to social justice issues and offering service to civil society organizations, stated in an e-mail that in the workshops she has been involved in, the participants "talk a lot about language and voice, and making sure that internet is the ultimate expression of diversity that it can be, and not controlled by one white, male, English-speaking consumerist-capitalist voice." Smith explained that the women she has worked with, mostly Latin American women, have an "urgency" to communicate. This urgency was evident in the videos produced by women who attended the digital storytelling workshop at the Feminist Tech Exchange (FTX) held in November in Cape Town, South Africa.

In separate interviews, Smith and Moffett agreed that most of the people currently engaged in citizen journalism are from the upper/middle class. But they said that non-profit organizations in many countries are working to narrow the "digital divide" that exists between classes, ethnicities and genders. An expert in citizen media and journalism in the United States, Dan Gillmor, said that "there are more people involved in the middle class and upper class, it matters on who has computers at homes." He said that, even though he does not have the full data on this topic, he believes the digital divide is "disappearing" and it is being reduced in the United States.

Information technologies and the Internet are not the solution to all of the world's problems. Many of society's ills are also reproduced throughout the Internet: crime, exploitation, violence, inequality. But the Internet also provides a space for people around the globe to communicate in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. It is a place where anyone can have a voice: a voice that can be heard, seen, and listened to by many. These are voices that journalists should also listen to.

See the Google map presentation that highlights the cities where some of the interviewees live and work.

*Manuel Castells is Professor of Communication and the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication, at the University of South California, Los Angeles. He is a world-renowned theorist on the information society and the Internet.

Photo published with permission of Women'sNet.

Twittering

2008-12-02T10:17:00.002-05:00

I'm still debating if Twitter is really the greatest thing around. I read that it was originally created as a way to stay in touch with family and friends, and be able to mantain constant and immediate communication. Its use has changed even though it was conceived to be more intimate than what it has become, which is fine because people appropriate themselves of technology in sometimes unimaginable ways (and this is part of its beauty). But even as a way to keep in touch with a close network, it really wasn't new, because we already had SMS, instant messaging and e-mails. On the other hand, maybe it works for larger networks, like news organizations or NGO's. But, even in these cases, "twittering" should have an intimate feeling, because if it doesn't then what differences it from RSS, e-mail updates, etc, etc, etc? I think WBUR's use of Twitter is interesting because they actually have staff replying to their followers. But Net News and BBC News offer more of what we see everywhere else: headlines and story updates. I think it could be a good tool for reporters covering breaking news, for example, as a way to offer updates to their followers. It also has proven to be effective for citizen journalists.

I have started an experiment with a couple of friends from Puerto Rico. We have set up our accounts to see if we really need/like/want to use Twitter. Let's see what happens!

A map of violence

2008-11-10T16:19:00.005-05:00

Citizen journalism and crowdsourcing are at its best in the map tracking the Eastern Congo conflict. The map, created by the Kenyan team Usahidi, shows the trail of violent incidents reported by people in the zone. There are a list of categories, such as riots, deaths, sexual assault, and looting. When you hit the icon, the link to the information of the incident appears: location, date, category, if it was submitted by an entity and if the information was verified. In the home page there is also a list of "mainstream" articles on the conflict. The site includes an easy way to submit an incident. This a very powerful and empowering form of journalism using visual tools.

Global Voices on the Rise

2008-11-01T20:35:00.003-04:00

The Internet has let us had access to voices we probably never imagined we could see, hear or read. For me, this is one of the most amazing things of the world wide web: how people all over the world can have access to audiences. Easy to use technological devices are cheaper every day and there are hundreds of organizations training people in poor communities, specially women, so they can tell their stories; so their voices can have an audience. Global Voices Online is a great place to find some of these voices. It's a very interesting project, founded by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca Mackinnon, where Third World bloggers have a space to share their their thoughts. In this case, these global voices are chosen by regional editors that work for the site. Most posts are written by the editors themselves, such as Juhie Bhatia, the Public Health Editor of Global Voices, who recently wrote about a new initiative in South Africa to fight against HIV/AIDS: sending free texts messages to cell phones to "encourage South Africans to get tested and treated for the disease." It would be interesting to research if these voices are penetrating the se countries mainstream media. The posts are a good complement to other media outlets and can shed light to what is happening in other countries. Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices, is my favorite project. It's fascinating to learn how people around the globe are getting empowered by doing grassroots journalism. Poor people, women, young people, ethnic and sexual minorities are writing about themselves and their communities. For example, the Nari Jibon project from Bangladesh is empowering women by teaching them computer, business, language skills, and grasroots media tools such as blogging, photography and video.

Photo (cc) Posted by White African, and republished under the terms of Creative Commons License Attribution Generic 2.0.

Intended Consequences

2008-10-25T12:28:00.010-04:00

This is the title of a gripping multimedia documentary that incorporates photojournalism and audio reporting to tell the stories of women raped by the Hutu Militias -called Interhamwe- during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Intended Consequences, by the photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik, portrays the lives of Tutsi women savagely raped during the genocide in which Hutus murdered 800,000 Tutsis -also moderate Hutus- while the whole world watched in awful complicity. There is something different about this piece, though: the women interviewed gave birth to children as a result of being raped. There are 20,000 of these children alive today in Rwanda. I can't even begin to imagine the complexity of the relationships of these mothers and their children. Or the horror of their stories. I can only admire their resilience and strength. Since I will never be able to fully explain what these women have gone through, this is an excerpt of Marie's testimony:

"After the war, my father constantly reminded me this kid is bad, that her family is bad. That her people, that her relatives killed my family. That there was no reason for me whatsoever to love that girl. But in me, I feel she is innocent. But I can't show it to my family members. So what I do when this happens. I go to bed and sleep and shed tears in my bed and keep quiet about it."

Torgovnik is the co-founder of Foundation Rwanda, the only NGO dedicated to helping these children and their mothers.

Listen to these women's words, look at their faces. Their lives, and the lives of their children, have been invisible. Until now.

Photo (cc) The Dilly Lama. Republished under the terms of Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic.

A courageous journalist

2008-10-19T15:35:00.006-04:00

Jenny Manrique's hair color is jet black. It used to be red-blond. This may seem as a trivial observation, but in this case it's not. Jenny Manrique does not look anything like she used to when she risked her life covering the violent control paramilitary groups have over rural areas in Bucaramanga, the capital of the Santander province, in northeast Colombia. While working for the regional newspaper Vanguardia Liberal, she traveled to remote parts of the province to interview victims of areas controlled by dangerous paramilitary groups. Ms. Manrique explained that these groups -generally backed and financed by the state- enforce their power by "ordering and cleaning" the "barrios" (neighborhoods), which in turn offers the population stricken with poverty and problems an illusion of safety and governance. She explains:

"If you have the power of fire arms, who is going to fight against you? They restrict your movement, the light and water you can use, they charge a 'security quota', and they also clean the streets of thieves and drug addicts to give people a sense of security. They are paramilitary groups. They say they are doing what the state hasn't done, but they use the power of their arms to coerce and intimidate."

After publishing her first articles, Ms. Manrique, who is 27 years old, started receiving threats by phone and e-mail. "When the threats started, I didn't pay attention. A friend told me: ' when someone is going to shoot you, they don't warn you', so I ignored the first threats." But in 2006 she had to flee her native Colombia. She was sheltered by the Press and Society Institute in Lima, Peru, and later went to Argentina. I met her at a Human Rights and Theory course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is the 2008-2009 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow. This prestigous award in honor of a courageous Boston Globe war correspondent who died while covering the war in Iraq is offered through the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF) and is sponsored in part by MIT's Center for International Studies. The fellowship provides women journalists that cover human rights and social justice issues the opportunity of doing research at MIT during nine months, after which they can work at The Boston Globe or The New York Times during the summer. Ms. Manrique is doing research on Colombian refugees in Latin America. She says her dream is to publish a book on this topic.

She preferred not to reveal her face for these photos.

Beat: Violence

2008-10-12T11:25:00.005-04:00

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma is a project of the University of Washington 's Department of Communication that "is a global network of journalists, journalism educators and health professionals dedicated to improving media coverage of trauma, conflict and tragedy.".It's an incredible site to find guides, research papers and tips on how to cover tragedies and violence issues. They are doing a wonderful job in helping journalists cover difficult issues such as sexual and domestic violence, child abuse, murder, wars, mass killings and natural catastrophes. Even though these are important topics that demand a certain expertise, knowledge and sensibility from the reporters and editors, they are often overlooked and underestimated. Every year, the Dart Center awards journalists who cover violence and trauma with excellence. I recommend the reportage "Johanna: Facing Forward" by Rachel Dissel (reporter) and Gus Chan (photojournalist) from the the Plain Dealer Reporter (Cleveland, Ohio). The series is about an 18- year-old girl named Johanna Orozco who was shot by her boyfriend. She survived. This is her story.

Photo (cc) Posted by Daquella Manera and republished under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic.

The 28

2008-09-30T13:39:00.005-04:00

All around the world thousands of undocumented immigrants struggle each day to survive. They leave their countries looking for a better life for themselves and their families. But in their dreamlands they usually encounter discrimination, xenophobia, hate, humiliation, despair and loneliness. Of course this is not the story of all undocumented immigrants, but of many. Of way to many. I want to share the story of 28 women from Mexico and Guatemala that are fighting to stay in the US after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the plant they worked at in Iowa. Women and children immigrants are particularly vulnerable because they are subjected to various levels of discrimination. Cruz Rodriguez, 31, was also a victim of domestic violence in Mexico and she is seeking political asylum in the US. The story was published in the excellent ethnic media site New American Media.

Photo (cc) Giulia Ciappa, republished under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Fact checking and transparency

2008-09-25T14:56:00.005-04:00

Fact checking and organizing information so people can understand and access it are two basic principles of good journalism. So, if we rule ourselves by these principles, definitely Politifact, The Washington Post's Votes Database, Project Vote Smart, and Factcheck.org are examples of journalism well done, even if some sites are better than others. The data and information posted on these sites -even though I miss context and analysis in some of them- are fundamental for a healthy democracy. And it's all right there.

My favorite sites are Politifact.com, the fact checker run by the St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly, because of it's engaging style and interface, and The Post's Votes Database because it has tons of information about the every day work of our senators and house representatives put together in a very easy way to navigate. The candidates section of Politifact.com is superb. You can even get the RSS feed of all the latest comments of one of the presidential or VP candidates and check how the truth-o-meter ruled them. I particularly enjoyed the job they did in fact checking if Sarah Palin's had really paraphrased Abraham Lincoln when she said the war against Iraq is a "task that is from God", as she told ABC's Charles Gibson.

Project Vote Smart has loads of information that citizens can access to know about their candidates and politicians, but something about the navigation style and design aren't very appealing to me.

Talking about politics, journalism, transparency and the infinite opportunities the web provides to disseminate information, I want to share the projects the Sunlight Foundation is working on. The cofounder Ellen Miller explained in a short interview with Wired that:

Washington politicians like the firewall they have erected.
They will have to be dragged into the 21st century

Check out some of the interesting online watchdog journalism the Sunlight Foundation is doing through mapping and databases.

Who are the others?

2008-09-22T10:01:00.002-04:00

"The others" are the people we sometimes don't see. Maybe we look at the them, but we don't see them. Who are the others? Some of them are women, children, the homeless, people living with HIV/AIDS, members of the LGBT community, undocumented immigrants, poor people, people with a disability, and ethnic minorities, just to name a few. In journalism we sometimes call them "the underepresented segments of society" because they generally have no space in the media: print media, television or radio. This has changed a bit over the past years with the work of commited journalists dedicated to cover these "invisible people" whose voices have been able to be heard. The technological revolution, with blogs, citizen journalism, videos, online publications and other forms of digital media, has changed the face of journalism, and has permitted other people to make themselves visible. In this blog I will explore online "mainstream" and "alternative" publications, articles, blogs, photographs, videos, and audios to share interesting pieces on human rights issues that give voices to "others".

Today I want to share the amazing multimedia project the Jamaican-Ghanaian poet and writer Kwame Dawes did on people living with HIV in Jamaica. "Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica" beautifully integrates articles, poetry, video, audio, music and photography to let these marginal voices be heard and these faces be seen. The project was commissioned by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting which sponsors "quality international journalism across all media platforms". I discovered Dawes' piece through the wonderful site Interactive Narratives that captures "the best of online visual storytelling as practiced by online and print journalists from around the country and the world."