May 2007 – Page 2 – Open Minds!

Outsourcing journalism: From eye witness to i-witness?

Outsourcing has arrived…in broadcast journalism.

Good reporting, we thought, has everything to do with being there, observing and then sharing the information, impressions and opinions. But some editors and publishers disagree.

Just caught this news in the Los Angeles Times, 11 May 2007:

Local news reporting outsourced to India
A news site hires two to cover Pasadena from afar. That helps a shoestring budget go further.
By Alex Pham, Times Staff Writer
May 11, 2007

When is local journalism not really local? When it’s about Pasadena and written by someone in India.

James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore for $7,200.

The council broadcasts its meetings on the Web. From nearly 9,000 miles away, the outsourced journalists plan to watch, then write their stories while their boss sleeps — India is 12.5 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.

“A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages,” said Macpherson, 51, who used to run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.

Read the full story

Wait till other media managers get to hear this.

And I can already imagine how our media intellectuals in South Asia will tear this apart.

Read Rediff India coverage of this story

Children of Men – the coming anarchy

“The Muslim community demands an end to the Army’s occupation of mosques.”

“The Homeland Security bill is ratified. After eight years, British borders will remain closed. The deportation of illegal immigrants will continue. Good morning. Our lead story…”

These and other disturbing news headlines are sprinkled throughout Children of Men, the 2006 dystopian British movie based on a 1992 novel by P D James.

It wasn’t a good idea to have watched this movie on my flight from Doha to London. I arrived to find London’s Heathrow Airport more crowded and chaotic than I’d ever seen in 15 years of arrivals. Is this a sign of things to come?

In all likelihood, it was just a routine Saturday, but the (fortunately well behaved) crowds made me think again of the coming chaos that Children of Men predicts will overwhelm Britain in just a generation.

As the movie’s official synopsis puts it:
The world’s youngest citizen has just died at 18, and humankind is facing the likelihood of its own extinction. Set in and around a dystopian London fractious with violence and warring nationalistic sects, Children of Men follows the unexpected discovery of a lone pregnant woman and the desperate journey to deliver her to safety and restore faith for a future beyond those presently on Earth.

And this is how a fan summed it up on Internet Movie Database (IMDB):

Set in 2027, when no child has been born for 18 years and science is at loss to explain the reason, African and East European societies collapse and their dwindling populations migrate to England and other wealthy nations. In a climate of nationalistic violence, a London peace activist turned bureaucrat Theo Faron, joins forces with his revolutionary ex-wife Julian in order to save mankind by protecting a woman who has mysteriously became pregnant.

When P D James wrote the original novel, she placed the story 35 years in her future. When Alfonso Cuarón directed its movie adaptation, starring Clive Owen, Sir Michael Caine, and Julianne Moore, the world had moved to just two decades within reach of 2027. And, ominously, the concerns of immigration, law and order and environmental degradation had all grown worse.

The movie portrays a dark and depressing near future for our species and the planet. This isn’t the imagination of writer and film-maker running amok: the ingredients of that dystopia are already evident, and we’re flirting with the sympoms while the trends evolve into status quo.

We have been warned.

Feeding Oliver Twists of the world…and delivering UN logos with it!

“Please, Sir: I want some more!”

These simple yet evocative words were etched into our memories by Charles Dickens, who created the story of Oliver Twist (1838), the poor orphan struggling – and suffering – in 19th century England.

Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of the time by surrounding the novel’s serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of his hardships as a child laborer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s.

The world has seen unprecedented creation of wealth since those dark and miserable days 180 years ago. But sadly, there still are hundreds of millions of children who share young Oliver plight — or worse: many go to bed entirely hungry in a world that does not have an overall shortage of food anymore.

Today, 13 May, thousands of people in different parts of the world will walk wherever they can as part of a global campaign in support of ending hunger – one lingering great shame of our time.

Fight Hunger: Walk the World is a global fundraising and awareness event that takes place every year in all times zones with one sole purpose – to call for an end to child hunger.

Fighting hunger website tells us:

Hunger is more than having an empty stomach. Hunger means not getting the necessary daily nutrition to lead a fully active, productive and healthy life.

Hunger affects more than 800 million people around the world. A child dies every 5 seconds because he or she is hungry.

This year, the organisers – led by the UN World Food Programme – had a viral video contest. It asked anyone, anywhere to do a short video promoting the event – and the issue of hunger – and upload. Some interesting videos have been received — even if some are blatantly in-your-face propaganda for the UN WFP.

That’s my big, long-lasting complaint about the UN family of agencies addressing and tackling the world’s ills. After a while, they allow their worthy issues to be eclipsed by their own self-promotion, public relations and spin. I wrote last month about how the entire MDG campaign has been subsumed by needless volumes of spin.

If only the World Food Programme and its sister agencies can resist their temptation to see every campaign, issue and programme as a logo-delivery mechanism, they will do a whole lot more good.

For that reason, while I will privately walk and think of those in hunger today, I will not contribute any money to the bloated bureaucracy of the United Nations World Food Programme. I would also ask that they go before a mirror today just before they step out to go walking with the world — and sincerely ask: do you see part of the problem or part of the solution?

Thank you, WFP, for delivering food to tens of millions of people worldwide who would not otherwise be fed, or fed adequately. But try and deliver a little less of your image and your logo, if you can. (We saw so much of this happen in the days and weeks that followed the Asian Tsunami disaster, and it was simply disgusting.)

Both hunger and hypocricy thrive nearly two centuries after Dickens and Oliver Twist. We must walk today to end not just one, but both!

Happy walking, everyone.

Watch the winning and commended videos in Fighting Hunger online video contest

Read UN WFP fact sheet about hunger worldwide

When will the next David Attenborough show up?

David Attenborough has done more to bring Nature and wildlife to the world’s television audiences than anybody else in the past half century.

Growing up in teh 1980s, I watched his pioneering series Life on Earth (1979) and The Living Planet. These series redefined how natural history documentaries were made, and inspired a whole new generation of film-makers and nature lovers.

Sir David Attenborough

Attenborough went on to make several more trail-blazing series, such as The Trials of Life (1990), The Life of Birds (1998) and The Life of Mammals (2002).

He has also produced a large number of stand-alone documentaries, and narrated an astonishing number of films and series, including the multi-award-winning Blue Planet (2001) and Planet Earth (2006).

Image courtesy Wikipedia

I have always been grateful for his inspiration. But Sir David earned my eternal respect when I read in his biography how he had given up British broadcasting’s most coveted post so he could concentrate on what he did best: making natural history films. From 1969 to 1972, he was BBC Television’s Director of Programmes (making him responsible overall for both BBC1 and BBC2), but turned down the offer to become Director General of the BBC. In 1972, he resigned his post and returned to programme making.

I recently came across the following news item, which reminds us that like all creatures big and small in the great Circle of Life that Sir David has so avidly told us about, he too is mortal. At 81, it’s time for the world to look for the next David Attenborough.

This item is from the latest newsletter of Film-makers for Conservation, a network organisation where my company, TVE Asia Pacific, has recently become a member.

New reality TV show to discover the next Attenborough

Join wildlife filmmaking finalist Bryan Grayson as he talks about his journey from engineer to wildlife film maker and discusses his hopes of being the next David Attenborough

David Attenborough, David Bellamy and Steve Irwin. All great men who have brought the wonder of nature to our front rooms. They have worked in some of the worlds most amazing and dangerous locations to show us the beauty, innocence and sometimes savagery of the animal kingdom.

Imagine filming rhinos in Africa, whales in the South Pacific or being within an arms reach of gorillas in the rainforest. Well now a unique new television project will follow six contestants as they embark on a demanding training course at the award-winning Shamwari Game Reserve in South Africa, where they will learn the essential skills and realities of creating a natural history documentary.

Thousands of people entered Animal Planet’s search for amateur film-makers to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime intensive filmmaking course with experts Andrew Barron and Lyndal Davies. The entrants, from across the globe, were filtered down to a final six and Bryon Grayson is the only UK finalist.

But exactly how do you cope with filming a charging herd of wildebeest, learn to track an elusive leopard and deal with stroppy presenters!? Here with the answers is the UK’s contestant, Bryan Grayson. He joins us to share some of his tricks of the trade and offers his advice to all other budding filmmakers.

Bryan Grayson joins us online at http://www.webchats.tv/webchat.php?ID=372 to discuss his hopes for being Animal Planet’s Unearthed wildlife filmmaker after taking part in this remarkable series.

Do you think you have what it takes to be a wildlife filmmaker? Enter here for your chance to appear in series two of UNEARTHED

Watch Unearthed promo video on Google Video

TVE Asia Pacific joins Film-makers for Conservation

Is UK’s Channel 4 the latest ‘Fossil Fool’?

Even as climate change gathers momentum as a worldwide concern, more media organisations are ending up with egg on their face about their coverage of the issue.

Last month, I quoted British environmentalist George Monbiot about the BBC’s appalling track record on this: see ‘The BBC as a Fossil Fool’, 7 April 2007.

And now, UK’s Channel Four can make its own claims to be a Fossil Fool.

The Independent on 8 May 2007 reported that the makers of a Channel 4 documentary which claimed that global warming is a swindle have been accused of fabricating data by one of the scientists who participated in the film.

The Great Global Warming Swindle was broadcast on 8 March and has been criticised by leading scientists for errors, distortions and misrepresentations.

Image courtesy Channel 4

The article reads:

The film has also been referred to the UK regulatory watchdog OFCOM which is considering a complaint from 37 senior scientists that the programme breached the broadcasting code on the misrepresentation of views and facts.

Now even a climate sceptic whose dissenting views were used by the film-makers to bolster their claims about the “lies” and “swindles” of global warming has accused the documentary of promulgating falsehoods.

Eigil Friis-Christensen, director of the Danish National Space Centre, has issued a statement accusing the film-makers of fabricating data based on his work looking at the links between solar activity and global temperatures.

The scientists who have written to Ofcom include Sir John Houghton, the former chief executive of the Met Office, Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past-president of the Royal Society, and Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. In a letter to Mr Durkin they call for changes to the programme before the DVD version is released, even though DVDs are not covered by the Ofcom Broadcasting Code.

“So serious and fundamental are the misrepresentations that the distribution of the DVD without their removal amounts to nothing more than an exercise in misleading the public,” they say.

Image courtesy the film's website

Commenting on the documentary on 13 March 2007, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian:

The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle…is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Just as the government launches its climate change bill and Gordon Brown and David Cameron start jostling to establish their green credentials, thousands have been misled into believing there is no problem to address.

The film’s main contention is that the current increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in “strikingly good agreement” with the length of the cycle of sunspots. Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind.

Read full commentary by George Monbiot in The Guardian 13 March 2007

Read the full article by Steve Connor in The Independent online on 8 May 2007

The Great Global Warming Swindle website

Profile of film’s director, Martin Durkin

Nepal’s Aankhijhyal is 500 — and counting!

Aankhijhyal is a Nepali word. It means window.

Aankhijhyal is today also a ‘brand name’ in Nepal. It’s Nepal’s most popular TV magazine programme on environment and social development, which recently produced its 500th edition.

Aankhijhyal logo NEFEJ logo

The half-hour programme has been produced regularly since May 1994. Now in its 13th year, it is one of developing Asia’s longest running television shows.

The landmark 500th edition was broadcast on 27 February 2007. In this special programme, its producers, the Nepal Forum of Environmental Journalists (NEFEJ), looked back at the interesting and challenging times they have chronicled and investigated.

And last night in Kathmandu, the Nepali capital, I sat down with a team of friends from NEFEJ to belatedly celebrate the occasion.

A dozen journalists, producers and film-makers joined us. We chatted away well into the night. There was no longer any worries about curfews and army check-points.

“We don’t often get together like this as one big group,” said Rabindra Pandey, head of Audio-Visual at NEFEJ. “Most of the time, we are too busy to socialise. We are chasing deadlines, or stories, or sponsors!”

There is much to cheer, both at micro and macro levels.

Sustaining a half-hour show on television is no mean feat in any part of the world, especially in a low income country like Nepal. Broadcasters here don’t put any money in programmes like Aankhijhyal . In fact, NEFEJ not only produces the show entirely at its own cost, but also pays for airtime on Nepal Television to get it out to the public! That’s the broadcast reality that many of our western colleagues are often unable to understand.

And the general feeling right now in Nepal is upbeat. After Nepal’s own People Power revolution of April 2006, people are hopeful that their ‘second chance in democracy’ can actually work better. While the streets of Nepal are as dusty and chaotic as ever, I can see far more tourists and far fewer soldiers on the roads now than on previous visits in recent years.

NEFEJ is a non-profit collective of journalists committed to communicating sustainable development issues. Foundecd 20 years ago, it has a much better record of democracy than Nepal itself: every year, office-bearers are democractically elected by its over 100 members. There is regular ‘change of guard’ at the top.

NEFEJ is also one of the oldest and strongest parters for us at TVE Asia Pacific.

Aankhijhyal is the organisation’s ‘crown jewel’. It’s the centrepiece of NEFEJ’s Audio Visual Department, and has been widely acclaimed for its investigative approach to sustainable development and social justice issues.

From land reform and agrochemical misuse to the conservation of heritage sites, and from the trafficking of women and children to HIV, Aankhijhyal has been covering a broad range of issues, concerns and controversies in the public interest. While remaining apolitical, the programme has also reflected the human, social and environmental costs of Nepal’s violent insurgency and pro-democracy struggle in recent years.

Filming Aankhijhyal - image courtesy NEFEJ

“Since its inception in 1993, we have come a long way and Aankhijhyal has managed to create awareness among the Nepalis on the issues related to environment and development,” says Rabindra. “Aankhijhyal still remains one of the most popular video magazines on Nepal Television.”

Aankhijhyal’s passing 500 editions is all the more significant because it has been sustained without a break by this non-profit cooperative of journalists. Whether or not external funding was available, NEFEJ has continued producing the programme – often using its own savings from other, better-funded projects.

And it was clear to me last night that they have no intention of resting on their laurels.

“There’s so much happening in Nepal today. We are living in a period of rapid change. We feel one half-hour show a week is not enough to capture the unfolding stories,” said NEFEJ’s current President, Sahaj Man Shrestha, himself a former CEO of a private TV channel in Nepal.

Image courtesy NEFEJ

Read TVE Asia Pacific news item: Nepal’s premier TV magazine Aankhijhyal is 500 (27 Feb 2007)

NEFEJ Aankhijhyal online archives

More about NEFEJ Audio-Visual Department

Read Indian magazine Down to Earth on Aankhijhyal

All images courtesy NEFEJ

Can you make a one minute film for a better planet?

One minute – or 60 seconds – is a lot of time on the air. Our friends in radio and TV broadcasting know this well.

And with shrinking attention spans, many news items on TV are now being packaged for a minute, or not much longer.

Now, Friends of the Earth (together with FilmMinute) are challenging us all to come up with very short films that are one minute long — and still pack a message that benefits our planet.

Image courtesy FoE UK

Their challenge: make a film of exactly 60 seconds which explores how we look after our planet and use it like there is a tomorrow.

Here are the key rules of the game:

60 seconds – no more, no less.
Ideally broadcast quality.
Consider audience – Internet, TV, phones, etc.
Contributors must be the sole author(s).
You can submit more than one film.
No unlicenced use of copyrighted material.
No rude, unlawful or discriminatory material.
No promotion of products or services.
Some prizes are only open to UK residents.
All green one-minute films can be entered, regardless of previous screenings and awards.

Deadline is 20 August 2007. That should give us plenty of minutes to come up with some really compelling one minute films.

Image courtesy FoE

Helpful links:

Making your greenfilm

How to submit your film (via YouTube!)

Competition rules and regulations in detail

Awards and prizes
FilmMinute – the international one minute film festival: make every second count

Gasp! Asthma on the rise – and we made it all possible

Gasp!

This morning, I woke up at 4.30 in the morning struggling to breathe. It’s another attack of asthma.

My lungs don’t know – and won’t care – that yesterday, 1 May, was World Asthma Day. All my long-suffering lungs need is some fresh air.

But in the increasingly polluted — and right now, incredibly humid — Greater Colombo, I’m not likely to find it any time soon.

World Asthma Day is designed to increase awareness of asthma as a global health problem. Those who live with Asthma, and suffer on a daily or weekly basis, know what it’s all about.

I’m among the lucker ones. My asthma is well under control most of the time, but an inhalor is never far away. In fact, asthma is my personal indicator of how clean or polluted the air is in places I visit on my frequent travels.

I’ve had bad attacks in Beijing and Kathmandu. No surprises there. But at least in the latter city, which I’ll be revisiting soon, my lungs feel that the air quality has been getting better.

So there is some good news, even if we have to look hard and dig deep for it. That’s part of the job for us journalists — and in this instance, I readily declare my self interest: I want to breathe more easily!

Last year, TVE Asia Pacific conducted a regional media training workshop on covering air quality issues in Asia. That was part of the Better Air Quality 2006 event, a large gathering of everyone concerned with cleaner air issues. It was held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in mid December 2006. Read TVE Asia Pacific website coverage of BAQ 2006 and the media training workshop.

Political, scientific and industry leaders made lofty statements about the value of clean air. Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia’s environment minister, said clean air was more important for Asians than even rice, the staple food for most Asians.

Inspired by the week-long event, I wrote an op ed essay that month titled ‘Grappling with Asia’s Tsunami of the Air’. It has appeared online at several websites.

Images courtesy TVE Asia Pacific

In that essay, I argued:

In the wake of the Asian Tsunami, some development and humanitarian groups used the phrase ‘silent tsunami’ to describe slowly unfolding emergencies that rarely attract much media coverage or global compassion. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan made frequent, passionate references to the ‘daily tsunami of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation.’

It’s easy to call Asia’s air pollution induced sickness and death another silent tsunami. Except that there is nothing silent about it: the lung-corroding, heart-threatening, cancer-causing and blood-poisoning pollutants are released with a thunderous roar from the region’s cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles and other motorised vehicles. Anyone who has stood in a busy intersection in an Asian megacity knows exactly what I mean.

For the want of a phrase, we might call this Asia’s ‘tsunami of the air’.

And this tsunami is very much of our own making — let’s acknowledge that we are all part of the problem, some more than others. It makes us culpable for what India’s Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) once termed ‘slow murder’ by dirty air.

Read the full essay on One World South Asia

TVEAP News: Rising Asia chokes, but continues its quest for cleaner air

Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities

Images courtesy TVE Asia Pacific

Breaking News from Onion News Network: They know it all!

Some journalists and media organisations never allow the truth to get in the way of a good story.

Now, as broadcast television trades more substance for style, on-screen graphics is everything. Unless a news story is supported with gimmicky, flashy graphics, the networks seem to think, it won’t be news anymore.

This ONION TV News Parody shows how getting the graphics right is more important to TV networks than getting the meaning right. The story keeps shifting but the anchor remains authoritative — without knowing what the news is all about.

Breaking News: Something Happening In Haiti

According to their self introduction: The Onion News Network (ONN) has set the standard for globe-encompassing 24-hour television news since it was founded in December, 1892. The network boasts channels in 171 languages and can be viewed in 4.2 billion households in 811 countries. Now get the only news you need on the web and from our esteemed media partners.

Onion News Network Promo

Earlier post: Jib-Jab Video: What we call the news