Far from the cozy classrooms of American journalism schools, students are venturing to remote and often dangerous parts of the world to learn how to dig up a scoop. The Ryerson Review of Journalism reports on one program that embedded students with soldiers in Iraq. Another school sent students to electronic waste dumps in Ghana, India, and China, potentially exposing them to toxic chemicals and roving bandits.

One student have hailed her out-of-the-classroom experience as “probably one of the best experiences I’ve had in journalism.” The programs have horrified others, including Klaus Pohle of Carleton University, who called the Iraqi embed trip “terribly irresponsible.”

What do you think? Should journalism students visit dangerous parts around the world? Or should war zones be left to the professionals?

Source: Ryerson Review of Journalism 

Al Jazeera English broadcasts to 150 million households in over 100 countries—with the exception, until very recently, of North America. As the news service makes headway in the United States and is poised to break into Canada, The Walrus takes an in-depth look at the history and challenges facing Al Jazeera English, “a network that much of North America still considers Terror TV.”

Source: The Walrus

It’s been an exciting but bumpy ride for the independent press in Eastern Europe in recent years. In the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, things got a bit bumpier this summer: The editorial staff of the Riga-based Baltic Times, an English-language newspaper that covers all three countries, quit en masse in late July because they hadn't been paid in four months and say they were being forced to write articles that favored advertisers, reports Latvians Online.

The encouraging thing is that they did what used to be nearly impossible: They launched a rival publication within weeks.

“Baltic Reports, which was officially launched today [August 25], is an independent online media portal established by former staff of the Baltic Times,” editor Kate McIntosh wrote in an e-mail to supporters.

“We had a disagreement with Riga staff journalists” was the understated characterization of the dispute by Baltic Times managing editor Sergey Alekseyev in an e-mail to Latvians Online. Alekseyev said the publication will continue.

In announcing their resignations, the ex-staff at the Baltic Times acknowledged financial pressures played a role in the drama—but so did journalistic standards: “While we appreciate that these are hard times economically for business and companies, we felt that it was no longer possible to continue to produce a professional product under such circumstances.”

Sources: Latvians Online, Baltic Reports

Image by PhylB, licensed under Creative Commons.

Forget putting video in magazines, it's high time we start putting our magazines in videos! That's what the Walrus did with their dramatic animated trailer for the September 2009 issue. It's a novel idea, and it's also an effective one. I was reading Helen Humphreys on the Plains of Abraham mere seconds after the trailer had ended.

Never heard of the Walrus? They won the 2009 Utne Independent Press Award for Best Writing. It's a fabulous magazine. But why take our word for it when you can hear it from Margaret Atwood, Broken Social Scene, Atom Egoyan, and Geddy Lee? They're all together (at last?) in another little video called  Why We Need the Walrus.

Source: Walrus

NBC’s reality show “The Wanted” trails the hunt for war criminals living normal lives, but lately has done more to unearth the complexities of the genocide in Rwanda and the political motivations that inform its reconciliation process.

The Rwandan government has been working closely with the show’s producer, Charlie Ebersol, to capture U.S. professor Leopold Munyakazi for his alleged role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, reports Andrew Rice in the New Republic.

Munyakazi, who claims he was a terrified bystander, sought asylum in the U.S. after he was released from a Rwandan prison. He has since become a very public critic of Kagame’s Rwanda, where reconciliation between perpetrators and survivors is virtually mandated and tough laws against “divisionism” have been enacted.

Rwandan prosecutors have urged the U.S. to return Munyakazi to no avail. “Then, last year, a new possibility arose, one that would allow Rwanda to make its case directly to the American people—on television,” writes the New Republic.

Source:  The New Republic

A television commercial for an Israeli telecom company has inspired a rare form of criticism: a real-life re-enactment. In the original, a group of Israeli soldiers jump from their vehicle in a panic when a soccer ball soars over the concrete "separation wall" and lands on their hood. A soldier kicks the ball back over the wall and a pass game breaks out between the soldiers and the invisible Palestinians. Responding the levity of it all, Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, told Reuters: "The barrier separates families and prevents children from reaching schools and clinics. Yet the advertisement presents the barrier as though it were just a garden fence in Tel Aviv." 

A video response posted to YouTube is a chilling illustration of Tibi's critique. In it, a group of Palestinians kick a soccer ball over a portion of the West Bank barrier, and are answered with tear gas canisters fired from Israeli positions.

Here is the original commercial:

And here is the response:

Source: Haaretz 

The facts surrounding Guantanamo Bay detentions are quickly slipping down the memory hole. “A protective order that governs Guantánamo records leaves room for the government to destroy documents, including lawyers' notes,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “or put them off-limits in the name of national security.”

A few dedicated archivists are fighting to make sure the Guantanamo Bay records aren’t lost forever, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. The team is collecting as much source material as possible for a collection that will be held at Seaton Hall, New York University, and using the Web At Risk digital archiving project. Archivists have begun by focusing on first-person accounts from defense lawyers, which will soon be published in a book called The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law (New York University Press).

“We know, at the time it's happening, that Guantánamo has potential for iconic and historical significance, and the truth of Guantánamo is going to be a matter of great importance," says law professor Mark Denbeaux, who heads the program. "It's been my experience that the battle to redefine these sorts of events can be lost if one side is more organized and eager to present its point of view." He adds, “It’s not a political exercise, it’s an educational exercise, and a historical one.”

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education