Donatella della Ratta, a reporter for Il Manifesto, the well-known Italian leftist newspaper, spoke at Aula 2006 about Al-Jazeera and the revolution in Arab media. Il Manifesto published Donatella’s report about Aula on June 18th. As of last week the paper has started an emergency fundraising campaign at risk of closure due to financial difficulties. In an email Donatella writes:
“We are a daily newspaper that publishes a national newspaper every day in 80.000 copies but we don’t have any publisher. The newspaper belongs to a cooperative of journalists and citizens… we need more financial support from citizens, we don’t want to be acquired by any corporation.”
Il Manifesto made international headline news through its involvement in the Calipari affair last year, when a reporter for Il Manifesto was taken hostage by insurgents and later wounded by a stray bullet at a U.S. checkpoint. Calipari, the Italian agent with the reporter, was killed in the shooting.
Ulla and I were going to Khao Lak this Sunday to stay in a beach bungalow for two weeks. When I woke up to the news a few hours after the tsunami had hit and checked the travel agency web site, a news flash reported that Phuket had been damaged, but that Khao Lak had not suffered as badly.
As it turned out this information was false. Today the representative of the Finnish foreign minitry was quoted in Helsingin Sanomat, the main newspaper, saying that “Khao Lak in effect no longer exists.” Khao Lak now has the highest body count of all the Thai beaches.
In the midst of the chaos, the Finnish Raya Divers guys were going around finding survivors, helping them get medical treatment, and texting their names to Alex (a fellow Aula member) and a group of friends who run a diving weblog at sukellus.fi. While the ministry’s phone numbers were jammed by the volume of incoming calls from worried relatives, the sukellus.fi blog had information that was accessible and up to date. The hobby blog suddenly turned into a kind of Schindler’s list of survivors, and the number of daily visitors rocketed to hundreds of thousands.
To me it is a startling example of the power that ‘we media‘ can obtain in a crisis situation. It’d be interesting to hear what crisis management experts (for instance, folks working on The Information Technology and Crisis Management project) think about the sukellus.fi incident.
Update: On March 30th, 2005 Alex and the rest of the Sukellus.fi guys received the ‘State Prize’ (10,000 Euros) from the Finnish Government for ‘Fast and up-to-date sharing of information about the boxing day catastrophy in South-East Asia.’ In less than a week’s time, the pages served over 900,000 visitors.
With the overwhelming amount of media coverage that’s being imposed on just about everybody in and outside the U.S. right now, recommending a TV documentary on the main candidates of the upcoming presidential election might seem a bit out of place. But Frontline producer Martin Smith, and Nicholas Lemann, who is the political correspondent of the New Yorker, have collected some highly relevant footage of the two men from the 60s to the present day. The result is called The Choice 2004. The full two-hour program is online here.
Gorbachev’s perspective: look for the causes of the present crisis not in Iraq, but in the situation that has developed in the US itself. “There would be no change in politics unless the US starts to contemplate its own model of economical and social development and unless it makes an effort to look at the world with more realism. In other words, what is needed is a profound perestrojka of the US itself.” via XMCA