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Written by Jelena
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Friday, 02 October 2009 11:33 |
Today we announced the availability of 24 scholarships to attend an intensive ten-day session of this newspaper's School of Authentic Journalism, February 3 to 13 of 2010 on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The application for scholarships is ten pages long and includes an essay requirement. The video above appeared on CNN last summer but was not filmed by the network. A citizen who had been on a bus to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to attend a protest against the military coup d'etat there took out his cell phone camera and began filming after soldiers stopped a caravan of buses and ordered everyone out of them. The soldiers - as the video discloses - then shot out the bus tires with their rifles.
In other words, the world would never have known this story had a regular citizen not videotaped it and then gotten the video to the network. This one scene represents the future of authentic journalism; a citizenry armed with its "weapons" (in this case a cell phone camera) and a will to break the information blockades. That's a big part of what we teach, in more advanced ways, at the School of Authentic Journalism: how to do this kind of work better, faster and with greater coherence.
Since the School is part of a larger international public teach-in on authentic journalism, I'd still like to share the application's essay description and its questions here, and invite you to add your own comments and thoughts on the questions it raises.
Essay Requirement
In June of 2009, in two different countries – Iran and Honduras - civil resistance movements emerged. The first against what many perceived as electoral fraud and the second against what many perceived as a coup d’etat. The regimes in both countries denied the charges and set about repressing, often violently, the protests. Both regimes engaged in heavy-handed press censorship and accused the resistance and also critical reporters of being the agents of foreign powers.
Reporters from BBC Persian and other media were deported from Iran. Reporters from TeleSur and other media were deported from Honduras. Internet access was often blocked or slowed inside both countries, as TV, radio and print media critical of the regimes saw their facilities seized, blocked or sabotaged.
And yet despite those efforts of censorship, images and words of the protests and their grievances succeeded in breaking the information blockade. Videos surfaced on YouTube and other online sites. People used cell phones to send text messages onto the Internet via Twitter and other portals. Bloggers and independent media narrated the story in spite of violent repression and threats against them.
And the international cable networks and other commercial media – unable or unwilling to report, many without reporters on the ground in these lands – ended up dependent on videos and images and audio recordings produced by citizens or independent media to tell the story. Without that work by media from below, the stories would not have been as fully seen or heard across the globe or inside those countries.
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Today we announced the availability of 24 scholarships to attend an intensive ten-day session of this newspaper's School of Authentic Journalism, February 3 to 13 of 2010 on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The application for scholarships is ten pages long and includes an essay requirement.