Frontline Club bloggers
Axe in Congo: Giving It Away
by DAVID AXE U.S. Army and Congolese army doctors render free medical care at a clinic in Kinshasa, as part of the Medflag ’10 exercise.
Guinea’s elections by motorbike part 2
Ks 1900-1975The road towards Ganta got patchier but was still pretty impressive. Once I arrived in town I swung a left, following a signpost that read ‘Guinea Road’ and after a couple of miles of dirt track I discovered the border post. There was a large, USAID-built concrete terminal on the Liberian side and a […]
Axe in Congo: Litter Training
by DAVID AXE Kinshasa — Corrupt and impoverished, Congo doesn’t have much in the way of emergency services. Wrecked cars become semi-permanent urban art installations on the side of the road. When fires break out, it can take hours for anyone to respond. MONUSCO, the U.N. peacekeeping force, has been forced to put out some […]
Guinea’s elections by motorbike
28/11/2010KMS 1702- 1900.A grey morning checking my gear and watching rain traverse Monrovia. I then mounted the heavily laden Bajaj motorcyle and wobbled off out of town, taking the noisy road through Red Light market that slowly turns north towards the interior. I remember thinking about the old saying that the hardest step in any journey […]
Wikileaks: cat among pigeons
Download this episode View in iTunes Watch the associated event here. A couple of days ago, I finished a post on Wikileaks by stating that the media organisation that refuses to play by everybody else’s rules is still learning its own game. I promised you more on that and here it is. One of […]
Axe in Congo: Can’t Please Everyone
by DAVID AXE Kinshasa — A free health clinic was one of the culminating events of the U.S. Army-led "Medflag ’10" training exercise in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While American instructors trained up Congolese medics, U.S. and Congolese officials oversaw registration of civilians to attend the clinic. The civilians lined up before a board […]
Reaction to the closure of Internet cafés in Kabul
Journalist Abbas Daiyar has an interesting blog post on this month’s decision by the Afghan Telecommunications Regulatory Authority to close 17 Internet cafés in the capital. The cafés had been warned not to allow their customers to view pornography or un-Islamic material. Daiyar argues that imposing such bans will not combat "moral corruption": "By shutting […]
Some thoughts on Wikileaks, the media and the truth
This was the second time I’d seen Julian Assange speak at the Frontline Club. A few months ago, the small club room was lined with TV cameras as the Wikileaks founder launched the Afghan War Logs leak. The audience of journalists that day were sceptical and were looking for a news line – they pushed […]
Axe in Congo: Training the Congolese Army
by DAVID AXE Kinshasa — Soft power can be tedious, exhausting, frustrating. A hundred U.S. Army doctors and medics are in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, to train several hundred medics from the Congolese Forces Armees de la Republique Democratique du Congo. The Americans’ idea: to leave the Congolese more capable and more professional than […]
Axe in Congo: The Army’s Training Dilemma
by DAVID AXE Kinshasa — Colonel Gilbert Kabanda, the surgeon general of the Forces Armees de la Republique Democratique du Congo — the Congolese army — is a tiny man, barely more than five feet tall. But he has a big speaking voice. On September 6, he took the stage at the opening ceremony for […]
Life in the Red Zones: Islamabad
How many of you have to go through eight security barracks on your way to work every day and back? How would you feel if you have to go through at least four security check posts, have special security vehicle permission and special entry pass, every time you want to enter in the premises of […]
The U.S. Navy’s social media manual and (not) “flattening communications”
The U.S. Navy has produced a social media handbook including guidance for sailors and Navy personnel as well as a section for commanders. In the introduction, the Navy’s Chief of Information, Denis Moynihan, suggests the manual is necessary because "the rapid growth of social media platforms and technologies have flattened and democratized the communications […]
Grants for photojournalists covering the aftermath of conflict
The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict — the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues […]
Why Britain?
At around 8 a.m. on Wednesday, two men dressed as street cleaners, fired a rocket propelled grenade hidden in a rubbish bag at a convoy carrying the British deputy ambassador in Yemen. After firing at the convoy, both assailants fled the scene, leaving their weapons behind. The armoured vehicle was able to withstand most of […]
Armenia: The Spear (updated)
Being based in Armenia for 12 years hasn’t only given me plenty to photograph and write about, but also provides me with an opportunity to fix for many large media organizations. Last year, for example, I regularly fixed for the BBC, Al Jazeera English and The Wall Street Journal as well as photographed and organized […]
Frontline Club opens in Tbilisi, Georgia
Surprising but welcome news spread on Facebook today. The Frontline Club is apparently opening up at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA) in Tbilisi, Georgia. In what appears to be an evolution of their own club, the new initiative promises to follow the remit of the Frontline Club in London. Media club that aims to […]
Yemen: repression veiled by law
President Saleh’s regime has long been renowned for extrajudicial abductions, threatening and intimidating journalists and crudely censoring the Yemeni press. Al-Ayyam, an independent daily newspaper based in the southern city of Aden, was once Yemen’s most highly circulated publication reaching more than 70,000 readers. Last May, armed men in civilian clothing confiscated and burned 16,500 […]
The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent on new tools for journalists
Harriet Sherwood reflects on life as a foreign correspondent after four months in Jerusalem for The Guardian. Here she offers an assessment of the new platforms available to journalists: "…in the digital age, there are other platforms to consider. I have flirted with Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. The former seems a useful […]
Journalists in Kyrgyzstan Get Help to Deal with Post-Conflict Trauma
Internews website: Journalists in Kyrgyzstan Get Help to Deal with Post-Conflict Trauma Internews Local journalists in Kyrgyzstan use a press center in Osh set up by Internews to support post-conflict reporting. (September 8, 2010) During inter-ethnic clashes in Southern Kyrgyzstan in May and June, many local journalists suffered physical and psychological trauma. Unable to do […]
BBC Newsnight says MoD refused to provide figures for Sangin attacks
British forces have handed over responsibility for security in Sangin, Afghanistan to their U.S. counterparts. More than a hundred British soldiers lost their lives in the district. As part of their research for last night’s coverage of this story, BBC Newsnight wanted the figures for "significant attacks on coalition forces in Sangin". They were trying […]
Should local voices replace foreign correspondents?
Solana Larsen, one of the co-founders of Global Voices, argues that local bloggers and journalists are able to connect us deeply to the stories they tell and are unencumbered by the news production process in Western media newsrooms: "Events don’t look the same when they are told from the inside out. I am reminded of […]
Embedded in Afghanistan: “All you can do is give a snapshot”
Embedded journalism in Afghanistan is on the agenda at the Frontline Club this evening. Several journalists are on the panel including Caroline Wyatt, (BBC), Tim Marshall, (Sky News) and the Club’s founder Vaughan Smith. While they’ll be discussing Afghanistan and embedding tonight, The Independent‘s Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent, Kim Sengupta, will be heading back to […]
Upcoming paper on the BBC’s coverage of the Mumbai attacks
Just a note to let you know that later this month I’ll be speaking about the BBC’s coverage of the Mumbai attacks in 2008. The paper is a case study of the BBC’s adoption of live text commentary to report breaking news. Indeed, Mumbai was the first time the BBC had used a ‘live-blogging’ format […]
The Gun Always Shines on TV
The US webmag Gawker recently published a video survey of Army recruitment videos from around the world. The most entertaining was this ad for the Ukrainian Army, which basically promises young men that they will score with the girls if they drive a big tank and fondle their gun barrel suggestively enough (although the clip itself looks […]
Embedded with the Taliban
Discussions around embedded journalism in Afghanistan tend to focus on journalists joining up with NATO or U.S. forces but what about the view we get from an embed with the Taliban? In the video below, Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal risks his life to film Taliban operations with a commander in Eastern Afghanistan. There’s some intriguing […]
Mid-Ramadan in Mogadishu is Just Another Bloody Day
It is the eve of the 15th night of the holy month of fasting in the Islamic calendar, but the families of at least 33 people killed in Tuesday’s attack will be mourning rather than feasting. Al-Shabab gunmen disguised as government forces stormed the Muna hotel close to the presidential palace and opened fire. One […]
Rwanda decides but what next?
There was no discussion about who would win Rwanda’s 2010 Presidential election among Rwandan and foreign hacks as we drove through the eastern provinces yesterday afternoon. As we passed shuttered polling stations, the betting began. How much would President Paul Kagame win by? By 5pm, we’d heard three preliminary results from three separate polling stations. […]
Global Voices launches Caucasus Conflict Voices
Since working on my own project using new and social media to counter local media bias in terms of reporting on Armenia-Azerbaijan relations and the still unresolved conflict between the two estranged neighbours over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, it’s been quite a roller coaster of a ride. If in late 2008 it seemed […]
Footage from Pakistan plane crash site posted to YouTube
Earlier today a plane crashed in Pakistan killing all 152 people that were on board. The Airblue aircraft came down in hills north of the capital, Islamabad. Footage from the scene of the aftermath was posted to YouTube and highlighted by the CitizenTube blog. In June, CitizenTube said it would increase its focus on finding […]
Media round up: Wikileaks releases Afghanistan war logs
Main coverage Wikileaks "The Afghan War Diary [is] an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. "We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and […]