Tag Archives: yemen

Media release: Yemen Times launches new website and restores lost archive

Yemen Times is today launching a new website and has begun to restore its archive after technical difficulties resulted in it being taken offline last year.

The independent English-language newspaper’s site suffered technical problems, resulting in data loss involving the organisation’s digital archive of news dating back to 1997.

“This was especially heart breaking,” said Yemen Times publisher and editor-in-chief Nadia al-Sakkaf in a release.

2011 was a time when the world wanted to know more about Yemen with the Arab spring and the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaqi.

Despite the technical difficulties with the site, al-Sakkaf, who has an MSc in information systems management, and journalists on the ground in Sana’a, Taiz, Aden and Hodeida, reported on the political situation in the May 2011 leadership crisis in Yemen.

“We write news in a neutral and professional way. However the world did not know,” said al-Sakkaf in the release.

In a time of technology and web 3.0 if you are not online, you don’t exist. Being online is not just having a functional website, it is also about traffic and how many people read your news.

This new website is like a rescue boat. Now we are at last visible, and can recover our old database manually.

The new site is based on open source software Newscoop made by Sourcefabric, which is also behind radio platform Airtime which al-Sakkaf plans to use in to broadcast news firstly via an online station and eventually creating Yemen’s first independent FM station.

Under al-Sakkaf, Yemen Times has published several books such as Breaking the Stereotype, a book on Yemeni women’s experience as political candidates in elections.

In 2008 the Huffington Post’s Magda Abu-Fadil said of al-Sakkaf, who is also a TED speaker, “her stride is fast, her energy seems boundless, she seeks reforms, she’s bold, she’s articulate, she’s young, and she has her own newspaper in Yemen to use as a platform for action.”

Video: Freelance foreign correspondent discusses reporting from Yemen and Libya

GRN, an agency for foreign correspondents, has posted a video interview with freelancer Portia Walker.

In the first in a series of interviews from GRN, Walker talks about her year covering the Arab spring in Yemen and Libya.

A former TV current affairs producer with Al Jazeera English, Walker explains how she moved to Yemen just before the Arab spring began.

She speaks about the “baptism of fire” in reporting from Yemen for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, Washington Post and the Economist as well as GRN’s TV and radio clients.

Expecting to spend time in Libya researching features, she found she was spending her time “daily news reporting” which “did not go down well at some times with the authorities” and led to her arrest a gun point.

You can find out more about GRN in this Q&A interview and read guide on how to become a roaming reporter.

The video interview is below.

Lens Blog: Photojournalist on assignment – Michael Kamber in Yemen

Fascinating and beautifully written piece by New York Times photojournalist Michael Kamber about a recent assignment to Yemen. Worth reading for Kamber’s description of the restrictions he faces and the difficulty of completing the assignment because of Yemen’s authorities.

Early one morning, a convoy of journalists drives out to a military camp. By the time the training takes place, there are more than a hundred journalists photographing a dozen or so Yemeni soldiers as they simulate a hostage rescue. The scene takes on a false, carnival-like air. My only honest option is to photograph the press photographing the soldiers. Anything else would feel like a set-up.

Full post at this link…

Journalism Daily: Candy Box billboards; Chicago Tribune’s new innovators; VentnorBlog reports Vestas

Journalism.co.uk is trialling a new service via the Editors’ Blog: a daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site.

We hope you’ll find it useful as a quick digest of what’s gone on during the day (similar to our e-newsletter) and to check that you haven’t missed a posting.

We’ll be testing it out for a couple of weeks, so you can subscribe to the feed for the Journalism Daily here.

Let us know what you think – all feedback much appreciated.

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RSF: Yemen’s ‘harassment and denigration’ of Al Jazeera

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has issued a statement condemning Yemen’s ‘harassment and denigration’ of  Al Jazeera television, including a threatening telephone call to Sanaa bureau chief, Mourad Hashem, earlier this week.

RSF said that Al Jazeera has been branded by the authorities as the ‘enemy of a united Yemen’ because the channel covered unrest in the south of the country.

“The authorities use and abuse defence of national unity to censor media that try to cover events in southern Yemen,” the press freedom organisation said in the release.

Full statement at this link…

GlobalVoicesOnline: 270 proposals for citizen media projects – the five best

In January Rising Voices, part of GlobalVoices, received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGOs: ‘all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities – long ignored by both traditional and new media – to the conversational web,’ writes David Sasaki.

“It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects.”

Five were chosen as ‘most representative of the innovation, purpose and goodwill that Rising Voices aims to support’: Abidjan Blog Camps; Ceasefire Liberia; Real Experience of the Digital Era (China); Nomad Green (Mongolia); Empowerment of Women Activists in Media Techniques (Yemen).

Full story at this link…