Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News

Journalism students who walked into Professor Pat Davison’s multimedia and digital storytelling class at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism in January, were faced with a huge challenge. International reporting has long been a staple of their program, and this year, the students were teaming up with students at Tecnólogico de Monterrey in Mexico City to create documentaries about life in Mexico. However, the class was mandated to stay away from the drug war for safety reasons.

After racking their brains for angles to take, one student said, “I don’t think we should try to avoid [the drug war], instead we should make it our focus and look at everything beyond the drug war.” This is how the project “Reframing Mexico” began. “All you hear from Mexico are negative headlines and the drug war, but there’s a lot more to it than that. This was a good broad umbrella. The goal was to paint a picture of Mexico City that goes beyond headlines,” said Davison.

The class’s final project ended up being recently re-published in the Washington Post. It is a series of short documentaries that zero in on a character--each one highlights an issue that the group wanted to tackle. Davison’s students partnered with students in a documentary journalism class at Tecnólogico de Monterrey, and the teams worked to find contacts for the stories. Davison’s class only had eight days in Mexico City to do the physical reporting, not much time to counteract the unpredictable.

"Free To Love" -- Megan Camm

Megan Camm, a Master’s student in the UNC journalism program, had planned to report on the religious ceremony of Santa Muerte. But the story required being in a dangerous neighborhood. “My Mexican partners didn’t feel comfortable spending the time we needed,” said Camm. So she ended up working on the story of Tania, a mother raising her baby in prison. The short video tells the story of Tania Yuridia Granados Monroy speaking about what it was like to raise her baby in prison, without the help of her mother or grandmother. Mothers are allowed to raise their children in prison until the age of six. But the film noticeably leaves out Tania's crime.

In the weeks following 9-11 my elementary school had us read TIME for Kids. The magazine ran endless images of firemen carrying victims. With the nation gravely wounded, the media helped create heroes and too often the heroes were men.

The book I’m reading for school, the Terror Dream by Susan Faludi, got me thinking about all this. For example, Sandra Bradshaw a flight attendant on flight 93, scolded hijackers with boiling pots of water but her actions were largely ignored. Instead, Newsweek painted the picture of hysterical female flight attendant screaming for help. There was no room for other narratives.

Now, 10 years after those attacks, I hope we recognize the heroes who didn’t fit the mold and think twice about how we document and report future tragedies. In times of crisis, I know it’s hard to see a situation for what it is and then report on it honestly. But shouldn’t that be the aim of journalism.

Belva Davis has true grit. Maybe you’ve never heard of her, but as she puts it - there were people dying in the south for her right to make it as the first black, female journalist in the West. There was no room for failure.

“Being beaten, being jailed - all of that had preceded my opportunity to do this work. I couldn’t let any possibility of not using all that I had to succeed - interfere with the journey to make it to the point of acceptance in the business,” said Davis.
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By Denise Tejada, Turnstyle News

Would you pay for online access to news?

Turnstyle Asks: Paying for News Online from Turnstyle Video on Vimeo.

Some of today's top hip hop bloggers met a packed house last month for the "If I Ruled the Blogosphere" Hip-Hop Bloggers Conference in Washington DC. I had front row seats as 2DopeBoyz co-founder Meka Udoh, Dallas Penn of Dallas Penn & the Internets Celebrities, OkayPlayer writer Jason Reynolds, Frank William Miller Jr. (FWMJ) of rappersiknow.com, and producer/emcee Odissee talked about everything from the genesis of the hip hop blog (actually that was just Dart Adams of the recently deceased poisonousparagraphs), to what they are doing to keep they're fans happy and their blogs afloat?

We play some clips from that conference and it sparks conversation around the motives of a maker.

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I got to interview Mohammed Omer, a young Palestinian journalist from Gaza. Mohammed is only 25 and is already an award winning journalist. In 2008 he won the Martha Gellhorn prize for Journalism in London. When he came back to Palestine after winning the award, he went through the Allenby Border crossing on the Jordan-Israel border. He was brought into a small room where he was interrogated, tortured, and brutally beaten by Israeli forces.

As heard on WABE and KCBS.

By Kathleen Quillian

I remember in elementary school, we would go around the class taking turns reading aloud from out textbooks. I wished I could speak as clearly and as fast as some of the other students. But each time it was my turn to read, a cold sweat took over my entire body. My jaw would lock and I would get a sharp pain in my teeth. As I forced the words out of my mouth, I would stumble over the sentences. I hated reading in front of others – and I still do.
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When Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean prison camp we asked Josh Wolf- who holds the record in the U.S. for the longest stay in prison for a reporter protecting his source material- about why reporters take risks.

In the wake of the release of Ling and Lee, and the capture of journalist Shane Bauer by Iran,  KQED-FM in San Francisco had writer and editor Andrew Lam on as a guest to talk about the subject. In that conversation Mr. Lam- who works for New American Media- talked about how young freelance journalists are putting themselves into dangerous situations without the same training and resources that reporters who work for the big news organizations have.

We followed up with Mr. Lam today on that topic, and on how the rise of citizen journalism is affecting the quality of information in the media today.

In May of 2000, Youth Radio was especially honored to receive a Peabody Award that was presented by Walter Cronkite.

The broadcasting world has lost its elder statesman. He will be missed.

[Our Feature Spotlight focuses this week on Citizen Journalism.]

Part Two In A Series

In the first part of the Guide we checked out Demotix, CNN's iReport and YouTube's CitizenTube and Reporter's Center. Now we continue the rundown of marketplaces for user generated content with a look at a hyperlocal powerhouse, the viewer-created pioneer, and crowd-sourced muckraking.

Ground Report