Press freedom: no time for complacency

January 8 is a day of celebration in our household. It is my 15-year-old son’s birthday. After meeting exiled Sri Lankan journalist Sonali Samarasinghe about two years ago, the day became known for something else.
 On January 8, 2009 Sonali’s husband, Lasantha Wickrematunge was assassinated in Colombo while driving to work at the Sunday Leader.
I recall hearing about Wickrematunge’s murder seven months before meeting Sonali. His chilling “Voice from the Grave” leader in which he predicted his death was circulated via email around our newsroom in Cape Town.
Wickrematunge’s death didn’t make big news around the country, save for a snippet in a few papers and perhaps a brief mention on the television news. But it made me sit up and take more notice of events unfolding in Sri Lanka. The devastating effects of the December 2004 tsunami had been given considerable coverage. However, the protracted civil war was covered sporadically and often superficially.
Sonali and I met in the United States while on a journalism fellowship at the Nieman Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We struck up a friendship, swapped notes about sambal and curry recipes and also our country’s mutual passion for cricket.
More profoundly, through Sonali, I was given a crash course in the complex political landscape of her country, and how brave journalists risked their lives daily.

One day, Sonali, US journalist Beth Macy (http://www.intrepidpapergirl.com/) and myself crossed the Charles River to explore Boston. We stumbled upon the open New England Holocaust Memorial, its six luminous glass towers set on a granite path. We strolled through symbolic gas chambers amid suffocating steam, with tattooed numbers of the deceased on the walls. Then we came to Martin Niemöller’s chilling Dachau poem: “First they came for the Jews,…Then they came for me.”. It was a harrowing experience. For Sonali, at this point, it was unbearable. These were the words that her husband repeated in his editorial published days after his death.
As a journalist I realised how comparatively “normalized” South Africa had become. I had entered journalism during the last decade of apartheid. I negotiated my way through a myriad repressive media laws, a state of emergency and a flagrant abuse of human rights by the government. Then the country fought for – and won – press freedom. It was enshrined in the constitution at the dawn of democracy in 1994.
This was something else for Sonali and myself to swap notes about.
Sonali had joined the Nieman fellowship as a journalist in exile, just like a number of journalists from South Africa during apartheid, starting with the late Lewis Nkosi – an outspoken Drum writer – 50 years ago. Other outspoken journalists often flew to the sanctuary of the Nieman Foundation after being detained, banned and harassed.
In tribute, a handful of South African journalists have been honoured with the Nieman Foundation’s Louis Lyons Award for conscience and integrity, all during the apartheid era. Recipients include Max du Preez (1991), Zwelakhe Sisulu (1987), Allister Sparks (1985) and Joe Thloloe (1982).
In the year of our fellowship, Wickrematunge was honoured with the Louis Lyons award, securing a unanimous vote by our group of fellows (won jointly with Afghanistan journalists).
I returned home to South Africa after our fellowship ended last July. Sonali remained in the US, still fearing harassment if she returned to Sri Lanka.
In Cape Town, Sri Lanka has all but fallen off the news pages, except for a brief period this year during the World Cup Cricket tournament.At the Cape Times (http://www.capetimes.co.za/), where I work, news about Sri Lanka rarely makes more than a brief, even though the paper stands apart from its competitors when it comes to international news. The reality is that space constraints have limited the paper to one dedicated page for world news.
But Sri Lanka is on the radar in journalistic circles. At last count, there were 19 journalists forced into exile, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. It is ranked fourth on the CPJ’s 2010 Impunity index, a ranking of countries where journalists are regularly murdered and governments fail to solve the crimes.
According to the CPJ: “Ten Sri Lankan journalists have been murdered over the past decade for their coverage of civil war, human rights, politics, military affairs, and corruption, but not a single conviction has been obtained. Most of those killings have come during (Mahinda) Rajapakse’s time as prime minister and president.”
According to Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index 2010, Sri Lanka is towards the bottom of the list, at 158 (with the worst being Eritrea at 178).
South Africa is relatively high up, at number 38, though it has slipped five positions since the previous year.
I write this as South Africa falls under the threat of censorship – unprecedented in the new SA. Politicians are showing increasing disdain for the media, the craft of journalism and the quest for truth. We face a statutory media appeals tribunal to monitor and regulate the press, we face new regulations in the form of a Protection of Information bill, which will censor state information, and the ANC-led government has stepped up its verbal attacks on the media, thus threatening to tarnish the country’s image as a bastion of press freedom.
Seventeen years into democracy, journalists are engaged in a new battle. The hard-fought freedoms that I was so proud of and felt so privileged to enjoy during my sabbatical in the US as recently as a year ago are now under attack.http://www.r2k.org.za/
These warning signs are a reminder that an open society can never be taken for granted. Press freedom is always under threat from the rich and the powerful. Threats are carried out in different ways, from censorship and banning to harassment and murder. We can never become complacent. Journalists from around the world – from Sri Lanka to South Africa – need to stand together to keep up the pressure.

*This article was first published on the new human rights website, http://www.lankaindependent.com/

Growing pains as a grown-up student

Clocks dictate the rhythm of modern life. For journalists, it’s deadlines that rule. So when a group of overworked mid-career hacks were plucked from shrinking newsrooms and conflict zones, relocated to the cerebral US city of Cambridge to indulge in personal growth and academic exploration – and ordered off deadline for 10 months – there was more than a degree of post-traumatic stress.
Going through my crammed sabbatical diary this week as my Nieman fellowship at Harvard University draws to a close, I see how my class contained the jitters. We set our own chaotic rhythm. Talks, media workshops, interviews, Harvard classes, conferences and media award-ceremonies competed with social events, music gigs and squash round robins, family-friendly soccer and sight-seeing across the Charles River in Boston - plus an obligatory Red Sox baseball game.

We dipped into the events calendar of the 34 other institutions of higher learning in Boston, but diary fatigue inevitably kicked in.
“The fellowship is like a hose,” former Nieman fellow, Gail Smith, told me before my departure from South Africa last August. “It just does not stop flowing.”

I left South Africa with my husband Steve Pike and children, Tyler, then 13 and Ella, 7. During “course shopping” in Orientation Week, I sampled classes at the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and Kennedy School of Government. In a Leadership class, a self-assured student dominated discourse with an intimidating professor, Ronald Heifitz. I discovered afterwards that the student was used to seizing centre stage – she was actress Ashley Judd.

Last a student (and not a very studious one) more than 20 years ago at Rhodes University, it was intimidating to walk into an undergraduate class. Here, ambitious, super-privileged young brains gather before world-renowned professors. Instead of pen and paper, students are armed with Apple Macs. They toggle effortlessly between note-taking and social-networking. When they raise their hand to ask a question, they don’t get stage fright or verbal dyslexia. The words flow melodically from their lips.
This is, after all, Harvard with a big H. More than 70 years ago, Nieman founder and benefactor Agnes Wahl Nieman battled to convince the Ivy League university bosses to let a Motley Crew of journalists loose on campus for a year of intellectual enrichment. Considered a “very dubious experiment” at the time, the first class of experienced journalists – some with basic education – were put to the test. The programme flourished. So far, more than 1,300 journalists – including about 80 South Africans starting with Aubrey Sussens and Lewis Nkosi in 1960 – have made the pilgrimage to Harvard for “a year of learning, exploration and fellowship”.

I have had the privilege of observing famous professors in action. Like an extra on a TV show, I saw African-American studies Professor Henry “Skip” Gates impress students with his provocative social oratory. In my modern African History class, Professor Caroline Elkins, who won a Pulitzer for her book on British atrocities in Kenya, Imperial Reckoning, shattered preconceived ideas about my misunderstood continent.
Lippmann House, the headquarters of the Nieman Foundation, became my second home. There, I succeeded where Palestinians in Gaza were thwarted when linguist and US rebel, Noam Chomsky, shared his views with fellows at one of our weekly seminars. At Lippmann, I also experimented with fiction writing under the razor-sharp eye of author Rose Moss – a former South African.

In our weekly New Media class, the crisis in journalism dominated discussion. We quickly grew tired of writing our own epitaph. We looked for solutions. Slow learners like myself embraced new challenges. Switching from seeing the digital era as the Grim Reaper, I latched on to the label “tra-digital journalist” – one who adapts to new mediums, but retains traditional principles and values.

Surrounded by many journalists who have adopted social networking and self-promotion to survive in the revolutionary news business in the United States, I opened a twitter account and a Linked-In account. I started a blog. I downloaded tweetdeck, audacity, realplayer, dropbox and Skype.
Our class of more than 30 fellows and affiliates (spouses) swapped notes about experiences in different corners of the globe – such as Gaza, Venezuela, Chile, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Britain, Portugal, China, Cuba and Peru. Fellows who covered the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and others who have been hounded by the state shocked us with stories about death and destruction, cover-ups and self-censorship.

We became a family. We bonded over shared passions and principles – non-fiction storytelling, press freedom, justice and truth-telling. We agreed that the craft of journalism needs to be cherished, no matter the medium.

End-of-year panic set in a few weeks ago. Over-stimulated and exhausted, I reached out for more. I toured the Boston Globe – the daily metropolitan newspaper. I sneaked a visit to the Lampoon – Harvard’s satirical magazine. I ventured into one of eight all-male final clubs, The Spee – which stands chauvinistically today 50 years after feminism. I also popped in to the court house in Boston to say howzit to the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, Margaret Marshall, a former South African anti-apartheid activist.

The Nieman tap is still flowing, but I have reached my word count and missed my deadline. I wonder, do you think my editor-in-chief will be sympathetic if I ask for a sabbatical from my sabbatical when I get back to Cape Town?

This article appeared first on the South African media web site grubstreet:

http://grubstreet.co.za/2010/05/life-in-the-big-hose-nieman-fellow-on-her-year-at-harvard/

Pictures: top: Harvard commencement on May 27. middle: Nieman sports team
bottom: With African American studies professor, Henry "Skip" Gates

BRAVE NEW WORLD: the 'Tra-digital' journalism era

Did you buy the newspaper today? This is the question I put to a group of Kennedy School of Government graduates last week during a class assignment. Not one student put up their hand. When I asked if they had read the news online, most put up their hands.
Although I wasn't expecting a full house of newspaper readers, the picture painted in that classroom was worse than anticipated.
There may have been only 25 students in the class, but they were mid-career professionals in their late 20s upwards, and so not necessarily from the savvy young Web generation.
For the past six months, I have been engaging with journalists from around the globe about our craft. I have met an incredible bunch of passionate people – from the Nieman fellows and affiliates to visiting journalists such as the New York Times’s David Rohde and the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson (pictured below left). I have been inspired and uplifted by the high standards and quality of reporting around the globe.

I have attended award ceremonies where journalists have been honoured for their excellence and bravery. Tunisian Naziha Réjiba, editor of the online news journal Kalima (pictured above right) and Somalian Mustafa Haji Abdinur, correspondent for AFP and editor-in-chief of the independent radio station Radio Simba. Others, notably Sri Lankan Lasantha Wickrematunga have been honoured repeatedly, though posthumously (Lasantha was assassinated just over a year ago).
But during our special time together, it has been hard not to talk about the elephant in the room - the crisis in newspapers and the doom and gloom in the industry. At times it has been depressing. At others, painful. Such as when a colleague bluntly told a seminar recently that: “The epitaph has been written… newspapers are dead.”
But what does it mean when we talk about the crisis in the print industry? And why is the public debate centred around the loss of newspapers per se?
As US media columnist Clary Shirky puts it, society doesn’t need newspapers. It needs journalism.
So, shouldn’t we be talking instead about journalism, of the importance of saving quality reporting, of making sure we are still out there where the action is? Shouldn’t we be talking about the struggle to keep the craft of reporting alive amid the technological revolution that is rapidly changing the way the world communicates?

"85% of online content is generated from newspapers"

The newsgathering process is unpredictable, messy and costly. There are no guarantees. Reporting is like fishing. If you don’t cast your rod, you have absolutely no chance of catching a fish. First-hand accounts are paramount.
It is about being there, on the ground, doorstopping people, hounding them at odd hours, hanging out and waiting. It is not about sitting at your computer waiting for a press release to land in your inbox.
And if newsrooms become so stretched that they stop sending out reporters to cover news, then the web will not be getting much news either. Why is this so?  Because most of the news on the web is aggregated content. And where does most of this aggregated news come from? Struggling newspaper newsrooms.
Former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll estimated in 2007 that "roughly 85 percent of the original reporting that gets done in America gets done by newspapers. ... They're the people who are going out and knocking on doors and rummaging through records and covering events and so on. And most of the other media that provide news to people are really recycling news that's gathered by newspapers."*
Increasingly newsrooms are transforming and catering to both mediums - the Web and newspapers, but the point remains: there is a heavy dependence on traditional newsrooms. It is these newsrooms - the engine rooms of news - which need to be protected and boosted. Newspapers and the Web both need solid newsrooms.
If a newsroom is forced to cut back so much they don’t have reporters covering key beats, it is a loss to society. If a reporter is not given the chance to spend time on an investigative story, then we are going to lose our vital place as the muckrakers of society, keeping the rich, powerful and influential on their toes.
And if we start to let other people compile the  news for us - ie politicians, publicists or Public relations officers - then we are not doing our jobs properly and society is at risk.Let's fact it. News that lands in a reporter's inbox is usually some form of spin.
And if we allow a culture to develop in which managers become so risk-averse that they don't send teams out unless they are absolutely sure they are going to return with a story, then we are on a road to nowhere.
There is a lot to be excited about  in this media revolution. Blogging and twittering have opened up new avenues for citizen journalism and first-hand, on-the-ground reporting. But newsrooms should not go out on a wing and a prayer in the hope that a blogger will do their work for them. They still need to be there, out in the field. They are the professionals, they have the expertise.
Last week during a seminar presented by Columbia Journalism School professor Sree Sreenivasan, a name was thrown around the room for the emerging journalist of today: a "tra-digital journalist" (coined by Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes). This is a journalist who retains the traditional, good old-fashioned values of the craft but who has the right attitude to be able to adapt to the changing technology.
Sounds good to me.
* Caroll source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/tags/newsgathering.html