Webinar: Delphine Halgand on challenges for freelance journalists

Delphine Halgand, U.S. director of Reporters Without Borders, explains how freelance reporting is growing around the world and the need those reporters have for a support system as well as information. The organization and its offices provide help for journalists … Continue reading →

Webinar: Pulitzer Center’s Thomas Hundley on seeking journalism grants

Thomas Hundley, senior editor of the Pulitzer Center for International Crisis Reporting, outlines the extensive work of the Washington-based Center and details the requirements for journalists seeking grants to support individual reporting projects around the world.  While many grants are … Continue reading →

Veterans join the tech industry: Watch the webinar replay

In anticipation of Veterans Day, NSJI co-director Tim McNulty spoke with two veterans, one who is engaged in running an Internet “incubator” office and other in developing a unique web application for ordering and paying for restaurant meals. Tom Day, … Continue reading →

The story behind the photo

These are the images that compel us to look: the photos that come charged with high emotion and human drama.  The images of war and conflict are especially arresting because of their life and death context.

Capturing the moment of death has a profound impact on the viewer. Robert Capa’s 1937 image of a “Falling Soldier” during the Spanish Civil War still speaks volumes today.  The blurry black-and-white photo of Senator Robert F. Kennedy dying on the floor of a hotel kitchen in 1968 also tells a whole story of hope and despair.  More recently, the crowd-sourced video of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian protester shot dead in the streets of Tehran in 2009, provides the story of conflict and election corruption.

Now with video-equipped iPhones and other smartphones, the numbers of images grow into the millions each day whether made by professional photographers or amateurs. But only a few will achieve iconic status.

Some iconic images disgust: Iraqi prisoners humiliated and tortured in Abu Ghraib, or a South Vietnamese police official executing a prisoner with a single shot to his head during the Vietnam War. Continue reading →

Track your own communication habits to better understand what the government might be tracking

How much can you discover about your own life by tracking just the destination of your phone calls, texts and e-mails?

National Security Agency officials, as revelations of their surveillance programs continue, insist they are not interested in the actual content of the millions of communications they track.  In the past several weeks, however, they have admitted collecting email messages of Americans by the tens of thousands.

The continuing revelations piqued my curiosity about what some company or government agency might learn in even the most casual collection of daily personal communications.

I asked seven graduate students to record the destination and number of their calls and online contacts during a two-day period in early July.  I chose the dates at random and in the past so they could look up their own records of online banking, credit card purchases, social media posts, websites and cell phones.  Their telephone calls, of course, were almost entirely by cell phone and the called numbers were easy to discover.  The GPS tracker embedded in most modern cellphones and nearest cellphone towers that record every signal help pinpoint the caller’s location. Continue reading →

In Out of Eden, a reporter relies on his senses, endurance and inner Google

I Googled “Saudi Arabia” the other day and got a suspiciously even numbered 461,000,000 results.  It will take awhile to sift through all of those links.

At the same time, news reports based on leaks about National Security Agency programs describe the raw collection of “metadata” on American citizens and others, electronically scooping up hundreds of millions of telephone numbers and other communications every day.

This ocean of data both amazes and confounds. (Yes, we want security. No, we don’t want our government spying on us.)  In this age of the terabyte and more, we’ve come to think that very little is unknowable if we are searching or if someone else is searching for us. We all just need more data.

Many of us sit at desks in classrooms and offices staring at screens for information. We relate to news and often to each other in electronic bytes, share photos and interact with the rest of the world in ways our parents, much less our ancestors, never imagined.  We sit in a rarely changing environment, we have “Google” perceptions of life outside our range and much of what we write and talk about is second-hand at best. Continue reading →

Looking beyond the Snowden chase

The cat-and-mouse Edward Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) scandal has fueled the summertime news cycle with a high tech — though drawn-out — version of a police chase.

Reporters flocked to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to search for the contractor who revealed secret NSA surveillance activities, and booked seats on flights to countries where Snowden might find refuge from the long arm of the United States government — only to discover he was a no-show.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic posturing of Latin American officials who feel the U.S. is bullying them into refusing asylum to Snowden added a side drama to media coverage of the actual crime — assuming that the courts will judge his actions a crime.

But the core issues have been more difficult to pursue.
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Having the ‘courage not to file’ — without regrets

Well into a summer of shelling, street fighting and sniper fire, several of the scores of correspondents covering the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 would joke, a bit wistfully, about the “courage not to file.”

That summer was long and, despite the Mediterranean breezes, the air was steamy and fear prevailed one day to the next. Fighting between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israelis surrounding the western half of the city was sporadic and intense, and from early June to the end of August stories of the destruction and urban warfare dominated front pages around the world.

Writing about military conflict has its dangers, of course, but adrenaline-infused reporting also carries a strange excitement. Some reporters and photographers become known as “war junkies” because they often move from covering one conflict to another. For many, a quote attributed to a young Winston Churchill describes the experience nicely:  “Nothing is as exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Continue reading →

Military and police reporting

[field name=”by”] With the wide range of topics that journalists cover, training in military and police affairs generally ends up falling by the wayside. But, for those journalists that do interact with the military and police, knowledge of military and … Continue reading →

National Guard and recruitment

[field name=”by”] When Capt. Dustin Cammack joined the National Guard in 1996 to help pay his tuition at the University of Illinois, he planned that his commitment would be short and he would not likely be deployed into armed conflict. … Continue reading →