Search

Natural and human‐caused disasters pose a significant risk to the health and well‐being of people. Journalists and news organisations can fulfil multiple roles related to disasters, ranging from providing warnings, assessing disaster mitigation and preparedness, and reporting on what occurs, to aiding long‐term recovery and fostering disaster resilience. This paper considers these possible functions of disaster journalism and draws on semi‐structured interviews with 24 journalists in the United States to understand better their approach to the discipline. A thematic analysis was employed, which resulted in the identification of five main themes and accompanying subthemes: (i) examining disaster mitigation and preparedness; (ii) facilitating recovery; (iii) self‐care and care of journalists; (iv) continued spread of social media; and (v) disaster journalism ethics. The paper concludes that disaster journalism done poorly can result in harm, but done well, it can be an essential instrument with respect to public disaster planning, management, response, and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses objectives of the local news radio station PFRM in Indonesia including creating citizen journalism, expanding its social networks, and managing operational costs. Particular focus is given to the process of information supply by PFRM including gathering information through social media, use of participatory journalism, and defining the role of media in a civil society.

This article draws attention to the emergent modes of urban sociality and circumscribed mobility that define the lives of traffic-stricken residents in the megacity of Jakarta, Indonesia. I argue that Jakarta traffic has exceeded the scale and discourse of a technopolitical problem of failed infrastructure; rather, the systemic and rhizomic nature of traffic provides the temporal infrastructure that governs the flow of living and leisure, and the patterning of individual desires and struggles in urban Indonesia. I use the term 'absolute traffic' to convey the limit horizon of gridlock as a set of exhausting physical and psychic states that urban residents survive daily. Despite such overwhelming challenges to mobility, particularly for the city's underprivileged populations, I argue for an agentive perspective of absolute traffic in which forms of play, negotiation and disruption form important moments for the public display of infrastructural aptitude. Strategies for surviving and engaging with absolute traffic emerge in ephemeral sites of finely attuned traffic subjectivity --in the sociality of strangers, the political demonstrations of activists, the growing citizen journalism for traffic reports on radio shows and social media sites, and finally, in the artistic sensibility of artists captivated by the vernacular forms of urban chaos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the citizen journalism Web site Groundviews, which aims to demonstrate and promote pluralist, progressive, inclusionary discourses and policies in Sri Lanka, and its role in peacebuilding of the country. Topics discussed include the Voices for Reconciliation (VfR) project, it serves as the portal for initiatives that seek to change attitude and narratives of the conflict, and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in postconflict peacebuilding.

The article discusses the impact of social media usage such as Twitter during the March and April 2009 apparent flood danger to the Red River Valley, which separates the North Dakota and Minnesota in a region that extends across the U.S.-Canadian border into the province of Manitoba. It also assesses the credibility of public journalism and user-generated media. Further, it mentions that an analysis of tens of thousands of tweets sent during the flood threat period indicates mechanisms for information production, distribution and organization in use in the otherwise unmanageable information space of microblogging.

This chapter discusses the use of blogs in higher education, including how students and instructors use blogs, the value of blogs in this setting, and privacy and security implications. The chapter also features an examination of the University of Minnesota's UThink blogging system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike journalists, anthropologists will tend to mostly anonymize the places they visit. However, as van der Geest has pointed out in these pages before, anonymity is not always what the people we research want from us. In this narrative, A.F. Robertson and Laura Cardús i Font show how our writing can become an asset to the communities we study, who, like us, are seeking to confirm their identities and improve their reputation in the overall scheme of things. In this narrative, the authors dwell on the nature of writing for both academic and vernacular audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This guest editorial reviews the now well recognized interdependence of aid and journalism, especially television, and the ubiquity of marketing considerations for humanitarian agencies in their drive for profile and funds. The potentially democratizing technologies of the internet and the mobile phone, as well as noticeable advances in non-Western communications media, have been hailed by some commentators as heralding a radical change. It is argued here, however, that the tensions exposed in the 1970s by the Unesco-sponsored MacBride Report, and in the associated campaign for a‘New World Information Order’, were never resolved and remain deep-seated. The article draws on Sidney Mintz's classic historical study of the production and consumption of sugar to propose that, in the political economy of disasters and relief aid, a continuous export flow of disaster imagery is processed by media organizations for consumption in the North, which reciprocates through the Southwards provision of aid. The banana industry, a market-led oligopoly, is adduced as a provocative metaphor. Finally it is suggested that transnational NGOs and their anthropological advisers could now have a major role in challenging the dominant market-oriented model of a global information society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]