Showing posts with label Reporting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reporting. Show all posts

Monday, June 20, 2011

Hurtigruten 5 days TV marathon June 2011

SOME FACTS: 8040 minutes of sea and arctic nature - on TV channel nrk2 and the Internet (creative commons).

BACKGROUND. Hurtigruten, the Norwegian Express Line, has for well over 100 years been the backbone of coastal Norway, bringing people and goods up and down the weatherbeaten west coast towards the north of Norway. It has struggled to survive and be prosperous in a mixed economy of private and public support and investments.

COASTAL CULTURE. More than a pure enterprise it is no doubt about a broad interaction and transportation of people and things, in fact, even dead bodies. Hurtigruten thus encompasses both daily and extraordinary transportations, as well as people experiencing nature and how to cope with it in the living coastal cultures. This TV, realworld and social media event uncovers through creative use of multimedia the encounters and experienced beauty of a number of scattered places, regions, inhabitants and families, locals and visitors to Norway's coast.

FLEET. Currently, a fleet of 11 ships service 34 ports from Bergen to Kirkenes, covering a distance comparable to the distance Oslo – Tunisia. Daily, and all year round.

WHY. Why this TV marathon from a coastal sea cruise, although among the most beautiful ones? Why are they - over in nrkbeta - doing this? It has been prepared for some months (*cf. e.g., invitation to an open-source ideation in January 2011, maybe more info to be checked here later). The idea emerged after the minute by minute 7 hours realtime show on TV, nrk2, of the railway experience from Bergen to Oslo, which achieved a lot of media attention and many viewers. But why doing more of this?According to nrkbeta's website, an article by ANDERS HOFSETH, dated 16. June, 2011:

"Primarily because we’re a publicly funded Public Service Broadcaster with a responsibility towards Norwegian culture; a responsibility for covering things important to the inhabitants of a small country, a country that in spite of, or perhaps because of our significant oil wealth has a vulnerable culture. And programmes like this aren’t economically feasible for a commercial channel; to a large amount of the public it probably seems completely useless, but to some of our viewers it can have a very high value, be something they wouldn’t get in any other way, and in twenty or two hundred years, it will be a strange document of life at the edge of civilisation from a different time."

Also, there’s the NRKbeta Doctrine, stating: "The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it."

EXPERIENCES SO FAR. Indeed, ample evidence suggests that nrkbeta and cocreators have done it again. Provided many with a triggering enduring experience. Because this is not merely about clock-time, it is about enduring time minute by minute. It encompasses both the subjective and intersubjective experiencing of something both locals and spectators may easily relate to, like hurtigruten.

Despite nrkbeta's relatively modest reasoning about it above, #hurtigruten in realtime and on TV, cell phone and twitter etc. has become a huge event and a success already in many ways including gaining hundreds of waving families and engaged or disengaged citizens along the coast and thousands (or sometimes millions) of participating viewers. In many ways, the current journey has become an umbrella and magnet for many kinds of encounters and performances. People are active with their experiencing including often their second screens whether it is a normal mobile, smart phone, iPad or lap top, camera etc. Several twitter reports have pinpointed that even shares in hurtigruten's shipping companies have gone up as well.

Just a wild thought: Maybe some of the key share owners could perhaps consider to give something back, for instance, to the further creative work in some ways?

CONTINUED ACCESS. The live stream is available at nrk.no/hurtigruten from Thursday June 16th 2011 until the ship lands in Kirkenes Wednesday June 22nd. Info on how to download etc. can be found there as well. You can reuse but need to acknowledge the cocreators and rights.
Content licensed under Creative Commons Source: NRKbeta.no http://nrkbeta.no/2011/06/16/hurtigruten-eng/ Norsk versjon av artikkel [...]

http://nrkbeta.no/2011/06/16/hurtigruten/

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Living without money film to Oslo soon



(First photo: Tone Andersen, second photo: Daniel Mazza).

Living Without Money is selected for the Eurodok Festival in Oslo, 16.-20.mars

Excerpt from synopsis:
The documentary Living Without Money portraits the life of 68 year old Heidemarie Schwermer, a German woman who made a deliberate choice to stop using money 14 years ago. She cancelled her apartment, gave away all of her belongings and kept nothing but a suitcase full of clothes. This was a decision that changed the entire outlook on her life dramatically.

Today, after 14 years, she is still living almost without money and claims she is feeling more free and independent than ever. The film follows Heidemarie in her day to day life and shows the challenges she meets by living an alternative lifestyle.

http://t.co/Rylug0o

Sunday, June 21, 2009

An eyewitness from Iranian hospital

I post this eyewitness report I found on a blog, it seems authentic.

THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2009

"What I have witnessed"
A powerful note from a female medical student in Iran, translated from Farsi by a trusty reader.


Hello,

It's painful to watch what's happening.

I don't want anything to do with what has been said this far, as I neither have the strength nor the resilience to face all these unfathomable events.

I only want to speak about what I have witnessed. I am a medical student. There was chaos last night at the trauma section in one of our main hospitals. Although by decree, all riot-related injuries were supposed to be sent to military hospitals, all other hospitals were filled to the rim. Last night, nine people died at our hospital and another 28 had gunshot wounds. All hospital employees were crying till dawn. They (government) removed the dead bodies on back of trucks, before we were even able to get their names or other information. What can you even say to the people who don't even respect the dead. No one was allowed to speak to the wounded or get any information from them. This morning the faculty and the students protested by gathering at the lobby of the hospital where they were confronted by plain cloths anti-riot militia, who in turn closed off the hospital and imprisoned the staff. The extent of injuries are so grave, that despite being one of the most staffed emergency rooms, they've asked everyone to stay and help--I'm sure it will even be worst tonight.

What can anyone say in face of all these atrocities? What can you say to the family of the 13 year old boy who died from gunshots and whose dead body then disappeared?

This issue is not about cheating(election) anymore. This is not about stealing votes anymore. The issue is about a vast injustice inflected on the people. They've put a baton in the hand of every 13-14 year old to smash the faces of "the bunches who are less than dirt" (government is calling the people who are uprising dried-up torn and weeds)

This is what sickens me from dealing with these issues. And from those who shut their eyes and close their ears and claim the riots are in opposition of the government and presidency!! No! The people's complaint is against the egregious injustices committed against the people.
POSTED BY EVERY IRANIAN AT 2:40 PM
LABELS: IRAN, IRANELECTION

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Power play in Iran

The Independent reporter Robert Fisk suggests this thesis:

"...Because the fundamental conflict in Iran is being fought not on the streets of Tehran – a mere tragic, brutal sideshow that could soon become a bloodbath – but beneath the cupolas and minarets and pale blue tiles of the mosques of Qom."

http://tinyurl.com/nxsk3g

Robert Fisk on the difficulties to check what is truth in Iran

20. June 2009 The Independent correspondent Robert Fisk reflects on the challenges to know what is truth or fantasy in Tehran
Source: http://tinyurl.com/nqnj7o
"...So let's take a look at those Iranian elections. A fraud, we believe. And I have the darkest doubts about those election figures which gave Mousavi a paltry 33.75 per cent of the vote. Indeed, I and a few Iranian friends calculated that if the government's polling-night statistics were correct, the Iranian election committee would have had to have counted five million votes in just two hours. But our coverage of this poll has been deeply flawed. Most visiting Western journalists stay in hotels in the wealthy, north Tehran suburbs, where tens of thousands of Mousavi supporters live, where it's easy to find educated translators who love Mousavi, where interviewees speak fluent English and readily denounce the spiritual and cultural and social stagnation of Iran's – let us speak frankly – semi-dictatorship.

But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi's support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.

This is also my suspicion: that Ahmadinejad might have scraped in, but not with the huge majority he was awarded. For with their usual, clumsy, autocratic behaviour, the clerics behind the Islamic Republic may have decreed that only a greater majority for the winner could decisively annihilate the reputation of its secular opponents. Perhaps Ahmadinejad got 51 per cent or 52 per cent and this was preposterously increased to 63 per cent. Perhaps Mousavi picked up 44 per cent or 45 per cent. I don't know. The Iranians will never know, even though the Supreme Leader told us yesterday that the incredible 63 per cent was credible. That is Iran's tragedy.

Yes, Ahmadinejad remains for me an outrageous president, one of those cracked political leaders – like Colonel Ghaddafi or Lebanon's General Michel Aoun – which this region sadly throws up, to the curses of its friends and to the delight of its enemies in the West. And the Islamic Republic itself – while it has understandable historical roots in the savagery of the Shah's regime which preceded it, not to mention the bravery of its people – is a dangerously contrived and inherently unfree state which was locked into immobility by an unworldly and now long-dead ayatollah.

And those nuclear arms? How many of us reported a blunt statement which the Supreme Leader and the man who ultimately controls all nuclear development in Iran made on 4 June, just eight days before the elections? "Nuclear weapons," he said in a speech in which he encouraged Iranians to vote, "are religiously forbidden (haram) in Islam and the Iranian people do not have such a weapon. But the Western countries and the US in particular, through false propaganda, claim that Iran seeks to build nuclear bombs – which is totally false..."

There are few provable assurances in the Middle East, often few facts and a lot of lies. Dangers are as thick as snakes in the desert. As I write, I have just received another call from Lebanon. "Mr Fisk, a girl has been shot in Iran. I have a video from the internet. You can see her body..." And you know what? I think he might be right."

Friday, June 19, 2009

The Independent today: Cockburn commenting on Iranian uprising



Courtesy: GETTY and the Independent (see link)
Protesters hold up a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini during a demonstration against the Shah on 1 January 1979
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/history-suggests-the-coup-will-fail-1708996.html#

History suggests the coup will fail, according to Patrick Cockburn, who reported from Iran during the 1979 revolution. In an article today he reflects on the fall of the Shah and explains why the current uprising is very different

Friday, 19 June 2009
"At first sight, what is happening in Tehran today looks very like the extraordinary events of the Islamic Revolution 30 years ago. But how deep do the similarities go? On 2 December 1978, two million Iranians filled the streets of central Tehran to demand an end to the rule of the Shah and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini. It was the most popular revolution in history. At night, people gathered on rooftops to chant "Allahu Akbar – God is Great". In the daytime, mass rallies commemorated as martyrs the protesters who had been killed by the security forces.

The methods of protest are very similar."
-"The spectacle, the symbols, and the language in Iran in 2009 are similar to those present in 1978-9, but the political forces at work could not be more different. The protesters then were much stronger than they looked; those of today have the odds heavily stacked against them."

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Who has tasted freedom... Rolf Fisk is reporting from Iran

Robert Fisk: Fear has gone in a land that has tasted freedom
In defiance of the ban on foreign reporters, The Independent's Middle East correspondent ventures out to witness an extraordinary stand-off on the streets of Tehran

Wednesday, 17 June 2009
AP
Supporters of Mirhossein Mousavi protest on the streets of Tehran yesterday


http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-fear-has-gone-in-a-land-that-has-tasted-freedom-1706912.html