Thursday, November 12, 2009

At the Kurt Schork Awards

I was lucky enough to be one of the guests at the Kurt Schork Awards tonight. The award honours the contributions of freelance journalists who cover conflicts overseas and make exceptional acts of courage to bring the news to us. I don't want to do a report on tonight's speeches and the people that won the awards. I feel I won't be able to write well enough to describe the valour of these individuals, hopefully you can follow the above links and find out more about tonight's winners.

But I do want to talk about a serious problem that covering overseas news faces, i.e. the funds are dwindling. Brave individuals are risking their lives for a relative pittance and things are not getting better. As it was mentioned by the panel tonight, I too don't believe there is a lack of interest amongst the British public about what happens overseas, it is the editors who are wrongly assuming this and it depends how you report the news. The more the editors cut out the overseas news from the newspapers and the news bulletins, the more distant people will get and the less interested they will become. Don't for a minute think that what trained journalists can do can be substituted by blogs and untrained substitutes.

So those of you who are always asking what can we do for Iran as expats or non-Iranians, add this to the long list of things you can do, if you think a television news program or a newspaper is not covering Iran because the editor thinks Iran news does not have a 'market' and people would rather know about some titbit news, ring/write/email and tell them that you want more Iran news and buy the papers that do cover Iran related news.

3 comments:

Arash said...

Potkin:

The problem is not that the news in the UK refuses to cover Iran...the problem is that they always cover it from the angle of regime stooges like Arshin Adib Moghaddam and Abbas Edalat!

Arash

Azarmehr said...

Thats a good point Arash and so we should let the editors know that by covering Iran news in that way its no wonder they don't find Iran news marketable. I know you already do this and more people can do it too.

Anonymous said...

It is really a shame that one cannot see any news about the young iranian (from kurdish region) patriot "Ehsan Fattahian" who was executed on wednesday in this blog, which claims to fight for democratic secular Iran.
Obvious iranian can get the news from BBC, VOA and all other popular media.
I hope there is no mean behind this.