Pay-for-News online: the debate intensifies

A very quick note to add on yesterday's post. I've just found this brief analysis that Adam Westbrook has published on his blog, which, image apart*, is rather spot on, and builds on Jay Rosen's argument being debated on Twitter: #gopaywall The message is: let's do something. Whatever it is, wherever it'll take us, "let's just do it."

Future Of Journalism, by Adam Westbrook

View more presentations from Adam Westbrook.

Stay tuned for more and read on, both here and here.

* Nothing wrong with the picture itself, but I personally see the roads ahead of the media industry being a lot more and way more obscure and different from one another. A maze really, an intricate labyrinth that crisscrosses the vast plain of the future of journalism. On a dark, moonless night.

Exploited in Palestine - The Freelance

One of the pictures I took at a NUJ's London Freelance Branch meeting and that was published on the branch's own magazine.



Journalist and researcher Penny Quinton has carried out a series of interviews with Palestinian colleagues focusing on how they cope with the stress of working in a conflict zone, often for Western news agencies that lay them off if they get injured or wounded. This was the case of Osama Silwadi (pictured) who used to work for Reuters and now runs a photo agency from a wheelchair.

A bit more on Bedouins of the Holy Land

The following extract comes from an essay I wrote about Theory and Practice in the work of a journalist. It says a bit more about my experience with the Bedouins.

In November 2005, photojournalist Alex Masi and I travelled to the Middle East to follow a project on Israeli Bedouin tribes, thanks to contacts we had made with Bustan’l’Shalom, a NGO working in the region, staffed by both Jewish and Muslim activists. That trip and the following one in March 2006 resulted in my first major story to be published in the English press. (Bora, 2006)

From the very beginning, I understood that a traditional journalistic approach — a modus operandi that, ideally, wants to be completely detached from the subject of a story in order to preserve impartiality — was not going to work as well as theoretical models studied at school would have put it. The reality of the Bedouin society struck me more deeply than I had expected, and I could not help but proving sympathy for their plight. Israeli citizens in every aspect, they constitute a sizeable minority of Israel’s total population — about 180,000 in a nation of 6 million — but they often struggle to raise the international public attention, overshadowed by the more familiar Palestinian conflict.

Furthermore, they are at a crossroad of historical importance that is alienating older generations from younger ones, thus threatening the very foundations of their patriarchal, herding society. Modernity infiltrating their uneducated lives, and their supposed integration with the wider Israeli society, have so far had as their sole effect the creation of two groups that face different problems in very different situations. About half the Bedouin population has accepted the government’s relocation offers and has become urban proletariat, while the other half has staunchly refused to resettle and still lives scattered in the desert, without electricity, water or sewage systems, in villages that the authorities do not recognise.

A few days into my trip were enough to understand that it was a story that needed to be told. But this is how far my journalistic instinct and my theoretical preparation could take me, while more pressing questions regarding the validity of a standard approach multiplied as I went along. Was objectivity achievable? Did I need, as a foreign reporter, to be a witness only and leave aside my own opinions? Could the emotions, smells, and tastes I have experienced living among the tribes have a role in my reporting and foster a better understanding of their reality?

Reference: Bora, D. (2006) Bedouins of the Holy Land. The Middle East, August/September
2006, pp. 54-58.

Journalism Training supplement - Press Gazette UK

For this very same supplement, I have also interviewed a number of editors and asked them what makes a good journalist. Interviewees included Roger Alton, editor of The Observer, Simon Grant, editor of Tate etc., and Kevin Bakhurst, head of BBC news 24.

Press Gazette UK - NUJ centennary special issue

These are few of the interviews I made with young and old(er) members of the NUJ, which this year is celebrating its 100th birthday.

It was touching and fascinating to speak to individuals that have played such an important part — well, at least some of them — in the history of the union.

All extremely nice people these union workers, more often than not I would find myself just amicably chatting with them at the end of the interview.


Visit the NUJ web site for more info about their activities.

Global Report - Press Gazette UK

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