Manal and Alaa's bit bucket free speech from the bletches

written for the APC blog

Nothing drives home the fact that you are a geek more than realizing you feel more comfortable talking to the intellectual property lawyer than to all these perfectly normal human journalists.

Yeah I got stuck in this media conference and it's like it's designed to intimidate me, from the selfish people who won't give you a ride from the airport to the formal functions.

But the worst part is explaining why you are here: "Erm, you see, I'm a blogger!".

What the hell does that mean? it's not a job, it's not an identity, and it shouldn't be treated as something soooo exciting.

I do have a blog (a much overrated one at that). It has become an important part of my life, but so is email. I don't walk around calling myself an emailer do I? And I don't get invited to conferences just because I send a lot of emails.  read more »

written for the APC blog

What do you think of Al Jazeera

On the second day of the Highway Africa conference they did a short "Hot Seat" exercise, they picked 4 journalists from different parts of the continent (no one from the north though) and asked them a bunch of questions about the state of African media.

One of the questions was "What do you think of Al Jazeera?"

Now this was a surprising question but in my opinion it was a very smart one, first it was a good test of how connected African media practitioners are with other places in the world. It seems that many didn't even know what Al Jazeera was.

But what interested me was to find out whether African journalists have some perception or opinion about Al Jazeera based on views  read more »