Untold Stories

Can't I just read in peace?

Elliott D. Woods, for the Pulitzer Center

Elliott Woods traveled to Gaza on a Pulitzer Center grant

Fishing boats at anchor in Gaza's lone protected harbor, on the Mediterranean coast beside southern Gaza City.  — Elliott D. Woods

Gaza City — The Gaza Strip boasts a beautiful stretch of Mediterranean coast line, and the breeze down by the water is oddly warm for this time of year.  In the southern part of Gaza City, a wandering foreigner starved for bow-tie clad waiters and sleek décor will be pleased to find a string of nearly-luxury hotels with sun-splashed terraces and stunning views nestled against a long stretch of haphazardly stacked concrete tenements — otherwise known as Beach Camp, one of Gaza's many permanent refugee communities.  When I know I'll be in the area, I like to bring a book and sit for a couple of hours reading in the sun, listening to the surf and the fishermen, smoking shisha.  That's exactly what I planned to do this afternoon.  But the Israeli military had other plans. 

I shouldn't have been surprised.  Last night Apache helicopters thumped back and forth above my neighborhood for almost two hours, doing god knows what.  This morning, F-16s were all over the place.  By the time I got settled with my new book and my shisha, nary a second passed without the "voice" of the F-16 drowning out the waves.  Gazan English speakers frequently use the word "voice" as a synonym for "sound."  It's always the "voice" of the drone, the "voice" of the helicopter, the "voice" of the bomb.  Today, the sky was full of menacing "voices."

Putting the focus on food

Alex Amend, Pulitzer Center

Nigeria, India, Guatemala, Kenya, Uganda and Tajikistan. These countries are all facing serious food security issues. They're also the focus of a comprehensive reporting initiative this year by journalists funded with Pulitzer Center travel grants and in collaboration with a wide range of print and broadcast outlets.

A key partner is The Project for Under-Told Stories at Saint John's University in Minnesota. The project was begun by veteran television journalist Fred de Sam Lazaro, who teaches at St. John's when he's not traveling the world for outlets ranging from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Wide Angle to Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. For more information on Fred's project you can read about its work in 2008 (PDF).

The food security reporting initiative has already produced some excellent reporting. Sharon Schmickle recently reported on a new strain of stem rust that is threatening wheat crops in Kenya and Uganda -- and the world -- for The Washington Post. She also created an audio slideshow for the Pulitzer Center.  Fred de Sam Lazaro and David Hecht's reporting from Nigeria has already appeared in GlobalPost and will be featured soon in additional broadcast and print outlets. David has also posted some terrific stories and photos to our Untold Stories blog.

There's plenty more yet to come. Fred is currently reporting in India and journalists Ilan Greenberg and Carolyn Drake are in Tajikistan. Sam Loewenberg leaves shortly for Guatemala. Stay tuned to Untold Stories for their reports from the field, and for updates on published or broadcast work. In early April we'll launch Dan McCarey's interactive web portal, showcasing all the reporting as well as tools for students, and on April 7 we'll join Fred for a forum at St. John's sponsored by The Project for Under-Told Stories. Details coming!

DRC: Rwanda's walk through Congo

Michael Kavanagh, for the Pulitzer Center
Michael traveled to the DRC on a grant from the Pulitzer Center

Women and children watch Rwandan soldiers leave the former FDLR stronghold of Nyabiando.
The Rwandans have left the Congo; we just followed hundreds (thousands?) of them across the border.  It took them a little over four weeks to walk 100 or so muddy kilometers to Walikale territory and back.  At the border, a few people cheered and said the FDLR problem was over.  In the towns I just returned from where the FDLR used to live, people realize their problems are just beginning.  They've been on the receiving end of revenge attacks by FDLR coming down from their hiding places in the forest.  They've had their possessions looted by the Congolese soldiers who supposedly came to protect them.

See more reporting at The Roots of Ethnic Conflict in Eastern DRC

On Myths and Poverty

Peter DiCampo, for the Pulitzer Center

The first time I went to the Agbogblushie Market area of Accra, the taxi driver did two things. He started by charging me three times the real price. Ghana had been my home for nearly two years at that point (this was last September), but I had spent most of my time living cheaply as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the rural north, with little exposure to the comparatively bustling and expensive capital city. I hardly knew where Agbogblushie was, let alone how much the cab fare should be. After a few weak attempts at bargaining, I agreed to the price and got in the car.

The driver's next move, on the ride over, was to warn me that I shouldn't be going to Agbogblushie at all. "It's a bad place," he said. "All the women are prostitutes, and all the men are thieves." He seemed genuinely worried about my safety, and uncomfortable at the thought of having to drive into the place himself. He referred to it as Sodomandgomorrah, which I didn't quite catch at first - in fact, it took me a few days of hearing what I thought was an African word before I realized people were saying Sodom and Gomorrah. Infamous for its supposed sins, the sprawling shantytown around Agbogblushie has been nicknamed after the fabled cities that, according to both the Bible and the Koran, God destroyed after warning the inhabitants to give up their wicked ways.

The driver slowed to a stop on the main road. I paid him and got out. It was getting dark and people were everywhere, but I didn't see the people who had agreed to meet me. I was nervous.

Talking Water

Jon Sawyer, Pulitzer Center

We're scouting out lively voices on water issues and you'll see some of the latest here -- three social entrepreneurs from Africa on the forefront of innovation in tackling the sanitation issues at the root of some of the world's biggest health challenges.

A major Pulitzer Center initiative this past year was Water Wars, the interactive web portal we created (with the help of designer Dan McCarey) to showcase the reporting we sponsored in East Africa by the Common Language Project team of journalists. The journalism appeared across multiple news media platforms, from major newspapers to World Vision Report, NPR, Living on Earth and Foreign Exchange. The web portal made the reporting available to high school and college students, with the opportunity to interact with our journalists both online and through their visits to over 30 schools in the U.S. and Nairobi, Kenya.

Over 1,400 individuals have joined this discussion, through questions and comments to the journalists as well as a "Share Your Story" feature that uses the YouTube platform to upload short videos and comments. We're eager to continue the conversation -- and in that spirit we'll be in Istanbul next month for the World Water Forum, the largest international forum for water and sanitation issues. Ernest Waititu, a Kenyan journalist who was part of the Water Wars reporting team, will join me in Istanbul. We'll split up after for brief field reporting trips to India and Ethiopia that are being organized by Media21, a Geneva-based group that promotes in-depth reporting on major global issues.

Where's the profit?

Alex Amend, Pulitzer Center

“Before I make my Exit, I will recount over some of the many good Deeds I have done, and how useful I have been, and  still may be, provided my Life should be spar’d; or I might hereafter revive again.” - The self-aware New-Hampshire Gazette after the Stamp Act in 1765. From an amusing New Yorker piece by Jill Lepore chronicling the radical infancy and many near-deaths of our free press.

At a YouTube panel last month on online news videos, Pulitzer Center director Jon Sawyer was introduced as the head of a non-profit journalism organization.

The New York Times' Ann Derry, another member of the panel, remarked, "I think we're all nonprofit at the moment."

That drew a knowing chuckle from the audience of journalists and the other panel participants, among them representatives from The Washington Post, Fox News and CNN. It’s a familiar sentiment by now, exemplified by the successive autopsies on and remedies for the industry’s gloomy fate. The question of course is what’s next?

Continue reading Where's the Profit? at our News Points blog

A wheat killer in the heart of Africa

Alex Amend, the Pulitzer Center

Today in the Washington Post Pulitzer Center grantee Sharon Schmickle reports on a serious wheat rust epidemic in Africa, the first in 50 years.

Small farmers in Kenya and Uganda who depend on their limited yield have seen their crops completely destroyed by this new strain, Ug99, and experts believe that if the strain continues to spread, real damage could be done to the world's supply of this essential grain.

Schmickle reports from Africa and St. Paul, Minnesota, where scientists are working to develop a variant capable of resisting Ug99.

Since the article was published this morning, people from all over the world have commented online. Read the article and join the conversation at Washington Post.com (requires login).

Also, see more reporting from Sharon Schmickle on this epidemic, including an audio slideshow, at her Stalking a wheat killer project page

DRC: New Violence

Michael Kavanagh, for the Pulitzer Center
Michael traveled to the DRC on a grant from the Pulitzer Center

The news is slowly coming in from all corners of North Kivu: Over the weekend, the FDLR stopped two buses, killed the drivers, and according to one passenger, told the people on the bus, "The RDF [Rwandan Defense Force] has come, and we're going to die.  But you're going to die, too."  

This weekend, in Pinga - the same town I was in only days before - the FDLR killed a village mayor for collaborating with the Rwandan Troops; the doctor whose home I stayed in said he's had 26 cases of rape.

Late last week in Minova, South Kivu, I met with crowds of the displaced (see picture) who'd fled FDLR attacks on their villages.  They said the soldiers are targeting anyone they think helped the RDF.

Go to The Roots of Ethnic Conflict in Eastern DRC project page

Online News Consumption: Strengthening the Fourth Estate or Devaluing Serious Journalism?

Janeen Heath, Pulitzer Center

Michael Hirschorn of The Atlantic wrote in a recent article, “End Times”: 

"If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands."

While many point blame at the decisions made by editors-in-chief to cut their staff and operations to stay afloat, eventually the finger blaming needs to point back to the source of the trend: that of consumer behavior. Consumer demand is shifting more and more (12.1 percent growth in 2008, according to a new report by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America)  to the hyper-fragmented news and information populating the Internet at an exponential rate, abandoning traditional forms of news supply.

In the new digital media landscape it is a race to sustain operations, often by attracting advertising dollars, which puts the news quality at risk, for how does a supplier attract advertising dollars? By garnering high traffic numbers, or essentially, popularity?

Ann Derry, Editorial Director of Video and Television for The New York Times, said at a recent Google panel,  “Broadcasting the World: The New Ecosystem for News Online”:

“Coming from a newspaper background, the advantage is you’re not counting clicks, but you’re actually looking at what the quality of the material is.”

The reality of it is, unfortunately, that quality isn’t necessarily providing the life support for most news producing outfits like it used to. With the advent of the Internet, people expect to get their news quick – and free.

Finish reading at NewsPoints.

“Abu Jandal, In the name of Jihad…”

François-Xavier Trégan, special to the Pulitzer Center

Nasser al Bahri, 36 years old, calmly disclaims all names given to him: “terrorist” by the United States, “infidel” by Islamists, embarrassing persona for Yemeni authorities, and role model for the younger generation… “So which one would you like to talk to?” the Yemeni asks. The former bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden has come to terms with the entirety of his experiences, but taken one by one in the context of the path he's taken and the apprenticeship he’s received.

Born in Saudi Arabia to Yemeni parents, the young Nasser was molded by newspapers and television. During the 1980s the first Intifada engulfed the Palestinian territories, and the images taken together showed a continuous chain of killing and torture. From that moment on, Nasser decided to be the defender of "good deeds, guided by emotion". It is thus that one day in 1994 he told his incredulous father of his commitment to the Jihad, and soon after secretly left the family home after morning prayer. Destination: Bosnia.