My new project

Well maybe project isn't the best word, more like obsession. I've jumped on the microblogging bandwagon and started a Tumblr site--African Media--to bookmark and document my adventures (so colonial I know) in consuming, well, African media.

So far there's a lot of stuff on African literary journals, glossy magazines and the launching of high-speed internet in the east. Use it as a list of bookmarks for rad stuff from around the continent.

The arrest of the Post's editor should be condemned

From the VOA
Zambia's Government Criticized for Harassing Journalists By James Butty
20 July 2009

The International Press Institute has expressed concern over the arrest and upcoming trial of Zambia Post newspaper Editor Chansa Kabwela.

The group reportedly said the Zambian government is using trumped-up criminal charges as a tool for intimidating and harassing journalists critical of the government.

Kabwela, whose trial is to begin August fifth, is charged with distributing obscene materials in order to corrupt what the government called the morals of society.

She reportedly sent pictures to government officials of a woman whose baby died while giving birth outside of a hospital during Zambia’s long nurses’ strike this year.

Read the rest of the article

Some background: The Post was highly critical of president Rupiah Banda during the election campaign last year. They published daily editorials against him accusing him of corruption among other things. Many Zambians, regardless of political affiliation, saw the tone as unnecessarily harsh and too focused on his personality.

That said, The Post was the main opposition voice in a media landscape skewed towards the ruling party and was, amidst the mudslinging, responsible for some valid reporting, including the story about gifts of food and sugar given to traditional leaders to secure rural votes. During the campaign there was open declarations from the ruling party apparatchiks and from the candidate himself talking about how The Post would be dealt with once Banda took power.

Many saw the government allowing the collapse of the country's main carrier Zambian Airways earlier this year, a business majority-owned by The Post, as a move against the paper. The details there were rumours at best. This recent arrest, however, is clear political manipulation and should be widely condemned. These are such outrageous charges--counstruing photos of a woman giving birth outside a hospital due to a labour dispute, the height of good journalism, as pornography--and I'm disheartened to see, at least from this vantage point, that Kabwela isn't getting more public support.

Here's a similar statement from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Doing online journalism right: grape picking in the Coachella Valley

This article from the LA Times on the grape industry of Southern California shows how little it has come from the days of Cesar Chaves and the sixties' grape boycotts. Especially well done is the audio slide show that accompanies the piece.

The work is hard, dirty and dangerous. It begins at dawn when the air is sweet and moist and stretches until midafternoon, when temperatures can top 120 degrees and the sun feels like a steel-toed boot to the head.

The pay is $8 to $9 an hour, less than it was 40 years ago when adjusted for inflation.

"Nothing changes," says Arturo Rodriguez, an attorney in the Coachella office of California Rural Legal Assistance. "It's the same harvest of shame."

Magazines West and the Western Magazine Awards

I've been attending Magazines West for the last two days as a reporter for Masthead Magazine. Despite seminars like Surviving the Great Publishing Meltdown of 2009 this year's conference seems less gloomy than last year's with more emphasis on the role magazines will play in the new media landscape.

Unfortunately, people are still pretty confused about the role of social networking. "Go be a video blogger" has been the sarcastic punchline of the day" as editors, writers and publishers talk fearfully about the fast pace of online evolution.

I'm actually going to do this though. Watch out for my new video blog launching sometime next month. I'm going to leave the conference's highlights for the articles I'm writing which will appear on Mastheadonline.com. Now I have to get ready for the Western Magazine Awards gala taking place in an hour or so. Being in central Africa all this year means I haven't read a single article or magazine nominated.

Burning questions: Can Tyee Bridge pull of a hat-trick again? Will Goats Across Canada win Best New Magazine?

Here's last year's coverage.

Dumb Headlines #2: The perilous Lujo Virus

Scientists identify new lethal virus in Africa

ATLANTA -- Scientists have identified a lethal new virus in Africa that causes bleeding like the dreaded Ebola virus. The so-called "Lujo" virus infected five people in Zambia and South Africa last fall. Four of them died, but a fifth survived, perhaps helped by a medicine recommended by the scientists.

Okay, so it's not thaaat bad. Like, it's basically factual but the tone is a bit off-putting. For once I'm glad for Western news media's habit of conflating all of Africa and not going for the more precise headline: Scientists identify new lethal virus in Lusaka. Similarly I find the new name for this virus, the Lujo, or the Lusaka-Johannesburg, virus quite hilarious. I want to say "Hey Johannesburg has nothing to do with this virus except for having good medical facilities for rich people." Either way I'm glad they came up with a name that has a creepy Stephen King quality to it.

I remember it mostly being a non-issue in Lusaka when this happened. A lot of people were really pissed because American super-pastor/success-guru T.D. Jakes cancelled his trip but for most it didn't register at all.

What was weird was that patient zero happened to be a white woman. At least I think she was. Nobody ever explicitly said so. The Lowdown, in it's typical insiderish fashion, published a confusing eulogy to one of their own. Then The Post had an article accusing the deceased of being an equestrian who often rode barefoot. Conclusion: that woman got what she deserved. Typical Post.

It was a far bigger deal in South Africa where the woman was airlifted and subsequently infected healthcare workers there. If I remember correctly, the whole region was put on alert for the mysterious Ebola-like virus from up-north. Or as some media referred to it, the "Zambia fever."

Here's the silver lining to all this:

The research is a startling example of how quickly scientists can now identify new viruses, Fauci said. Using genetic sequencing techniques, the virus was identified in a matter of a few days _ a process that used to take weeks or longer.

Along with Fauci's institute, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and Google also helped fund the research.

Since when does Google fund medical research?

thanks to Texas in Africa for alerting me to this

Zambian Media Online

I wrote this for Journalists for Human Rights' Foreign Correspondence Site.

Central Lusaka is saturated with busy internet cafes. “Business centres” advertising copying, scanning and internet can be found in many of the richer neighbourhoods and shopping areas. My office has three competing wireless networks and so did my former flat. None of them were mine unfortunately but the point remains, Zambia—or at least a specific segment of urban middle class Zambia—is online.

The increasing availability of “high speed” internet—or just internet depending on your perspective—despite prohibitively high set up charges is creating a boom in Zambian online content.

There's a large Facebook presence with plenty of groups dedicated to the silly and serious. Blogger.com lists 1,300 blogs based in Zambia using its free software. This is misleading however as most are created by international volunteers and NGO workers who often keep a blog only as long as they stay in the country. Here's a great piece with links to the best Zambian blogs covering everything from politics (well duh) to conservation, football and music.

The rise of the Zambian blogosphere is not being matched by the major newspapers. Both the state-run Times of Zambia and the Daily Mail have horribly out-dated sites replicating their printed material in a mess of oldschool design and flashing banner ads. The weekly Lusaka Times is much better than the dailies with a blog format and a healthy comments section primarily from the Zambian diaspora in the US and Britain. The Post, the most widely read newspaper in Zambia promises a slick modern news site at first glance but asks you to pay as soon as you click on an interesting headline. At ten US dollars a month and available with credit card only I'm assuming that the site is meant to target the diaspora community.

The Post has everything to lose by alienating its domestic online readers. A strange fact of Zambian life is that internet is increasingly available in places where newspapers are not distributed. According to UNESCO, only 5 out of 1000 Zambians have access to a daily newspaper. Because of the underdeveloped road system, copies of the Post reach Chipata in the afternoon and barely reach outside the main cities at all except for days or even weeks later. Cellphone networks, however, cover almost the whole country and now with new inexpensive cellular modems, and internet cellphones, Zambians can, and do, plug into the internet almost anywhere.

The threat to the Post's future online hegemony are sites like The Watchdog and The Zambian: simple sites that embody many of the values of the new web. Both sites have existed for only a matter of months but have grown considerably. The Watchdog, tied somehow to a paper version I've never seen, is most like a traditional news site. By doing breaking news, criticizing official sources and encouraging reader response through comments it keeps me checking daily. Hopefully, with their small budget and tiny (2 people?) staff they'll increase their coverage.

The Zambian is a bit bewildering, something of a blog aggregator like Afrigator.com, but also a social networking platform and a bit of a news site. They apparently have almost 800 users, though the daily activity is still low. If they can make it a bit more user friendly I'm sure it could really take off. If they can find a way to make money off their content they will be very successful.

Dropping Truth Bombs

In an otherwise banal article from The Post about Patriotic Front MPs voting against the party line for salary increases, opposition leader Michael Sata drops a bomb.

Asked if he was disappointed that members of parliament went against his position on the issue of salaries, Sata said he could only be disappointed if he was not a Christian. He said the members of parliament were depriving Zambians representation because they were interested in serving their pockets instead of people.

"It's good that we have passed Easter because if not, we would have remembered Judas Iscariot. Jesus was betrayed by a Jew," Sata said.

I'm often baffled when the Zambian political discourse inevitably turns to bible verse but this one is particularly confusing. The tradition is that whoever quotes the book wins the argument, no questions asked. This leads to dodgy biblical analogies that rarely get challenged. In this case, I wonder, is Sata Jesus and the rebel MPs traitorous Jews or are the MPs Jesus and their constituents Jews. Who is betraying whom?

It doesn't really matter does it? Citing the Bible in politics is not meant to clarify, but to muddle. Mel Gibson would be proud.

The Congo Situation is Baffling

Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda is telling the BBC reporter that he plans to march on Kinshasa claiming that he's not an agent of Rawanda and is in fact a proud Congolese. I'd been listening to Nkunda speak for weeks on the BBC. The radio gave me the impression that he could only be reached by smuggled audio recorder in some damp jungle camp. I was surprised then when I moved into my new house, turned on Al Jazeera and there he was, all fifteen feet of him, wearing his trademark late 90s R&B glasses and confidently posing for the world's cameras and chatting with reporters.

It's strange how world media digests this new fighting. Since the Rawandan genocide, Tutsis are considered the victims and Nkunda, with his media savvy but perhaps correctly, brands himself as a Tutsi defense force. Why then are they going to march on Kinshasa? Why is the entire region so afraid of him? Can someone fill me in?

In one of Stephanie Nolan's blog posts she mentions being stuck in a remote eastern Congo village with no power, water or food, yet she could read the New York Times on her Blackberry. With that in mind, take a look at Ushahidi.com. Originally designed to monitor post election violence in Kenya, the site takes cellphone and web reports of violence and displacement and plots them on a map of the Lake Kivu region to give you a better idea of the geography of the conflict.

ps I stole that pic from the BBC website. It says Getty images on it if you look closely.

My Ryerson Review of Journalism Pieces

The highlight of my time at the Ryerson Review of Journalism were a couple of articles analyzing Vancouver's media.

The most substantial was a 4000 word behemoth on the Globe & Mail's attempts to establish themselves as a truly national newspaper (Canada isn't Ontario FYI) by looking at their somewhat futile efforts to woo Vancouver readers. It took months to research and write and, in the end, was largely inconclusive about whether it was a success or not. The real conclusion was that CanWest, with their monopolistic ways, will control the Vancouver market for many years to come. Patricia Graham, EIC of the sun, wrote a rather angry letter to the editor calling me a hack. Something about "standards free journalism." I'm quite proud actually.

My other RRJ favourite was an online feature, about the WestEnder's attempt to rebrand themselves as an alternative weekly and compete with the Georgia Straight. I'm pretty sure, mostly judging by their covers, that the WestEnder has gotten a lot worse since I wrote the piece. Interestingly enough, a piece in 2007's Langara Journalism Review throws a new lead on it, shortens it and ends up with a vaguer, sourceless and out of date version of my article. I'm not saying it's plagiarism, just lazy. Don't take this as a slur against the Langara J-School, a lot of good writers come out of it, in fact I'm anxiously waiting fo the 2008 LJR which has a story by Jackie Wong about the travails of alternative media types living in Vancouver. I'm apparently one of the main characters.