Frontline Club event on blogging and journalism
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 30 April 2007 at 16:35
Tags: Al Jazeera, BBC, Journalism, blogging
The Frontline Club in London will be celebrating World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday Thursday evening with a very interesting-sounding panel discussion on the role of political blogging in global journalism.
The speakers will be former Guardian multimedia correspondent Ben Hammersley and BBC College of Journalism editor Kevin Marsh. They will be joined on a telephone link by Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman and the Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah.
The event will be moderated by Richard Gizbert, who hosts the Listening Post media programme on Al Jazeera English.
They will be discussing some fairly loaded questions, if the the Frontline Club web site is anything to go by:
Join us as we discuss the role of blogging on World Press Freedom Day, weighing up whether political blogs are the only platform for meaningful critical discourse or whether they are digital narcissism, insular and error-ridden.
…
So what is the role of blogging? Is it the voice of the future? Are bloggers filling in the gaps the mainstream media cannot address? And is anybody paying attention to what is being said?
On the other hand, the event will likely also shine a light on the important issue of cyber-dissidents who have been persecuted by their governments for exercising their freedom of expression online.
This should be an interesting event: Hammersley’s last Frontline Club encounter with Marsh last September was one the best recent discussions of how blogging and low-cost media production tools are changing journalism in recent months. Sadly the video is no longer online, but Marsh later incorporated some of the ideas that emerged from that evening in his address to the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow.
No doubt some other bloggers and journalists who have given these issues some thought will be in the audience. It should be a very interesting evening.
Update: Kevin Marsh has already posted his initial thoughts on the topic.
Tags: Al Jazeera, BBC, Journalism, blogging
