Archive for the ‘Journalism’ Category
Kigali grenade attacks: Journalistic choices in three acts
Act I, in which I am not a good authority on anything that happened last night
No confusion: I didn’t cover the grenade attacks. Last night, I posted links to the work of a bunch of journalists who did — Hez Holland and David Kezio-Musoke/Reuters; Josh Kron/CNN International (last night, though oft with the NYT); Max [...]
The alleged power of one
Tom over at aviewfromthecave offers a critique of a recent Washington Post article about a couple, the Hughses, who went on safari in Tanzania and then decided to start a bike charity for residents of Karatu, a village near the safari site where the couple stopped at a local school and learned the kinds of things [...]
Why Enough will always get Congo “wrong” — and why we should maybe thank them for it
I’m going to go straight to it: Because advocacy is politics.
Advocacy is aspirational; it is rhetorical; and it is manipulative. And none of those things is prima facie bad (though there are better and worse ways to do them).
It seems to me we should no more expect advocates to offer a nuanced and complex [...]
The White Reporter’s Burden in Africa II: Journalists who get over it
In an effort to be productive in my criticism, here are nearly two dozen or so Western journalists I think do good work in Africa.
This all started with Phil Bronstein’s Easterly-inflected praise of the courage of Nick Kristof to admit “that there is a white man’s burden in reporting on Africa.” That’s the wrong [...]
Yes, Nick, there is a white reporter’s burden in Africa
But it’s not being white on the Dark Continent. It’s that there are so many other bad white reporters who came through before us.
By us, I mean a new generation of Americans reporting on Africa. We are not Nick Kristof. We don’t need a white protagonist, and those of us who have been here long [...]
New Work from the Great Lakes
Just a heads up on a few pieces, if you’ve missed them and care. I’ve got an article on the Harvard Humanitarian Institute’s fantastic survey from South Kivu in the CSM; a piece about Burundi’s one-candidate elections in the same; and a Foreign Policy article about a Burundian radio station flirting with danger. [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [