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As you read each one, think about your reaction to the information, your level of engagement, and the likelihood of you wanting to find out more about this incident. Obviously, the amount of information will provoke a higher level of reader interest, so focus more on what factors are helping you to connect with the story (hint: it’s all about the visuals, as if you didn’t know that from being on this site already). All give different angles on the same incident, which took place almost 3 years ago in Baghdad.
1. From Reuters: July 12 – Photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh, both of whom worked for Reuters news agency, are killed in eastern Baghdad during clashes between U.S. forces and militants.
2. From the New York Times: BAGHDAD, July 12 (2007) — Clashes in a southeastern neighborhood here between the American military and Shiite militias on Thursday left at least 16 people dead, including two Reuters journalists who had driven to the area to cover the turbulence, according to an official at the Interior Ministry.
“They had arrived, got out of the car and started taking pictures, and people gathered,” Mr. Sahib said. “It looked like the American helicopters were firing against any gathering in the area, because when I got out of my car and started taking pictures, people gathered and an American helicopter fired a few rounds, but they hit the houses nearby and we ran for cover.”
3. Reuters again:
The last photo taken by Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen before he was killed on July 12, 2007
Photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in Baghdad on Thursday in what witnesses said was a U.S. helicopter attack and which police in a preliminary report called “random American bombardment”. The U.S. military in a statement issued just after midnight on Thursday described the incident as a firefight with insurgents. It has said the killings were being investigated.
“Our preliminary investigation raises real questions about whether there was fighting at the time the two men were killed,” said David Schlesinger, editor-in-chief of Reuters. Residents and witnesses interviewed by Reuters said they saw no gunmen in the immediate area where Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh were killed in Baghdad’s al-Amin al-Thaniyah neighborhood. They said they were not aware of any clashes in the area leading up to the Apache helicopter attack around 10.30 am local time. Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh had gone to the area after hearing of a U.S. air strike on a building around dawn that day.
On Sunday, the U.S. military returned to Reuters two digital cameras that belonged to Noor-Eldeen which were taken by American soldiers from the site of the deaths. No pictures taken by Noor-Eldeen on July 12 show clashes between militants and U.S. forces. The pictures show no gunmen, nor residents running for cover.
The U.S. military said last week it had called in “attack aviation reinforcement” after coming under fire from small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. Nine insurgents and two civilians “reported as employees for the Reuters news service” were killed, the statement said.
4. Video, courtesy of Wikileaks (visit their website for more information on their corporate/governmental whistle-blowing). Released earlier today at a press club meeting in Washington DC, the footage reportedly came through a source with connections to the military and has since been verified as legitimate and been broadcast globally (BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera…) – here’s a full video report from Al-Jazeera (plus interview with the editor who published it online).
More on this tomorrow, but please post your comments/reactions – and retweet the link.
After what felt like an age of translating, tweaking, laying out, re-tweaking and all the rest in photoshop and indesign, I’m proud to announce that the first print run of the Honduran comic is underway as I type this. It should be ready in a few weeks time, so expect your copies around April 20th (US readers) and end of the month (rest of the world). I am now more aware than ever of the inevitable delays in going to print, but having seen one of the vast (almost full US letter size – see left with a stunt hand to give you a sense of proportion) copies in all its technicolour glory, I can tell you it’s well worth the wait. Thanks to Angela Vidergar for correcting my spanish translation for the second part. Now all I need are more orders to ensure I can push up the size of future print runs.
It’s always gratifying to see that it’s not just us self-publishers who are treading the precarious profit trail – apparently as of June, readers of the times in the UK will pay a princely £1 for the privilege of access to www.thetimes.co.uk for a day, or £2 for the working week. Here’s the full skinny, courtesy of that trusted bastion of fine journalism, The Sun. Surely it can’t mean a wholesale lockout/access denied scenario for the more parsimonious amongst us – it’ll probably be a bare bones version with none of the rich content that’s up there at the moment. Question is, will that prompt a split in news content between raw twitter-esque headlines and live feeds, embedded content and video/audio sources? Answers in the comments section. Speaking of which, the illustrious winner of the last post’s quiz on the most corrupt country in the world is…Somalia, closely followed by Afghanistan. The verdant wonderland that is New Zealand sneaked the least corrupt prize.
Perhaps the self-proclaimed “most revolutionary magazine in the world” holds some of the answers to the above question. Launched by Andy Warhol 40 years ago, Interview magazine’s ipad version seems remarkably unrevolutionary from the below video. In fact, the only stand out moments from the slideshow/larger iphone feel of the preview is the embedded live video. Until creators start to rethink the way they create content instead of simply publish it, all this digital innovation will seem like whistle-and-bells add-ons to the existing mode of information delivery. Decide for yourselves below:
If you liked the centralized approach to presenting disparate sources via google’s living stories engine test yesterday, but thought it lacked a narrative element to keep your interest buoyant against the tides of fast-aggregating real-time news feed, then I’ve got just the antidote, albeit one that’s not very current. Below is a phenomenal piece of multimedia journalism, housing photos, testimonies, vivid characterization and storytelling in the same site. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s all interactive. Here it is, an interactive photo essay by the French photojournalist Gilles Peress, documenting the last weeks of the siege of Sarajevo in February and March, including the exodus of Serbs from the suburbs from which the siege had been mounted. It’s a meticulously documented narrative, so take your time to wade through it – sadly we’ve missed the window mentioned here to join the online debate about the topic (only by 16 odd years), but it stands as a innovative approach to fostering debate between readers and journalists.
For more of a one-shot visual approach to interactivity, check out this interactive map of global corruption in the public sector. The darker the blue, the more corrupt the country. Any guesses for the most corrupt, before you sneak a peak? Leave your answer as a comment. Speaking of comments, I’ve also just finished the final translation for the Honduran comic into spanish, and posted it as a word doc in the Honduras page, here. If you’ve got a good level of english/spanish translation skill, then please have a look and leave me a comment with any suggestions or changes. Gracias!
I’ve finally come good on my promise to translate the rest of the Honduran coup comic into spanish, which the polyglots amongst you can read here. Feel free to send me any corrections, suggestions or translation errors that may have slipped past my iron-clad grammatical grasp. I’ve also added a Honduran comic thread to the discussion forum on the Archcomix page, so click here and get posting on it. The other big news is that Ryuhei Okada of the Caracas Cafe blog has offered to translate the Honduran coup comic and Right to Return into japanese, so big thanks to him.
Lately I’ve been looking into how animators around the world have been combining narratives with a journalistic message to give a different perspective on news issues and show us what life is like in typically inaccessible parts of the world. One striking example is Fatenah (left) from Palestine, telling the story of a young girl of the same name who’s grown up in the Gaza strip.
Speaking of bringing stories to life, I also recently came across Google’s living stories, part of an online experiment that houses all the contextual information to a specific news story in the same template, similar to a google wave document in a lot of ways. Granted, it still suffers from the same scroll down beyond the break ad infinitum of standard online news sources, but it’s certainly a start. Let me know what you think in the comments section. More cartoons and sequential journalism later on tomorrow.
UPDATE: Scroll down if you haven’t read today’s post for the backstory on Oscar Romero’s assassination, 30 years ago today. For those of you that have, check out this video from the Daily Show’s recent segment on the Texas board of education members who are essentially in charge of dictating the national curriculum, given that their state orders the most copies of school textbooks. The worrying part involving Oscar Romero begins at 2:50, and shows Patrica Hardy from the Texas State Board of Education arguing that Romero should be omitted from text books…because no one knows who he is.
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the murder of Salvadorean Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered by paramilitary troops at the altar as he celebrated mass, and commemorated in the above snippet from my comic that featured in the latest issue of Presente! To read the comic, click back to the Archcomix archive here, or order your copy of the Honduran Coup: A graphic history using the button on the right sidebar. Here’s the report from the BBC.
Many have linked Romero’s murder to the work of Roberto D’Aubuisson, far-rightist national guardsman who is alleged to have led deathsquads during El Salvador’s bloody civil war, apparently earning him the nickname ‘blowtorch bob’. Here’s his obituary from the NYTimes, which quotes former Salvadorean President Cristiani as labelling D’Aubuisson, “a fighter to open political spaces and look for a democratic path in the country”. Is ‘opening political spaces’ a diplomatic term for “leading a deathsquad”? Use your readerly judgement. Either way, it’s better than “a pathological killer”, which was US Ambassador Robert E. White’s epithet for him. One thing that is undeniable is D’Aubuisson’s links to the School of the Americas (now WHINSEC), placing him in the company of a veritable who’s-who of Latin American military top brass who had a similarly proactive attitude towards “opening political spaces”. Visit the School of the Americas Watch to find out more and get involved.
Below is footage from multiple witnesses of the shooting, eerily chronicling the turn of events from both the shooters’ and the congregation’s perspectives. Thanks to Tim’s ElSalvador Blog for the video.
In the wake of SXSW interactive earlier this week, the web has lit up with talk of new technologies for revolutionizing news content and consumption. Speaking of which, here are the winners of the festival’s web award winners, sneaking you a glimpse of the future apparently. Though that was on Monday, so it just about balances out as the present. One of the buzz words in the ‘future of journalism’ panel was the idea of context, and essentially how the outpouring (and overflowing) of real-time news via all the now widely-accepted feeds are actually numbing the public’s interest in important topics as opposed to stimulating it. The answer? Many suggested harking back to narrative approaches, with the most-often quoted perfect example of detailed, informative and, most importantly, engaging reporting coming courtesy of This American Life and their Giant Pool of Money episode. For those of you hearing about it for the first time, TAL is one of the best podcasts out there, is streamed for free every Monday, and is available for subscription through itunes. Go. Now. Subscribed? Ok. You should also try Radiolab too, which is of the same ilk. Please – if you can recommend any more, leave a comment or email me – I’m in the process of creating a links page where I’ll house this aural treasure trove.
The reason why these two podcasts are so phenomenally successful and effective? Because of the way narratives are interwoven with the raw data of a topic. We meet the characters, we hear them explaining their actions from their point of view, and we get a sense for why they acted the way they did – whether they’re mortgage brokers or first-time buyers taking out loans they can’t afford to pay back. Obviously, TAL’s medium is different from mine, so my focus is visual, but it got me thinking – what are other ways to incorporate narrative in news reporting?
Photojournalist Ed Kashi has embraced a multimedia approach by creating a fast-streaming slideshow of his photos around Iraqi Kurdistan – somehow bypassing the intrusive glare of a videocamera to present a far better portrait of the subjects in his shots than I’ve seen in any live feed. I especially like that Ed’s shots include sequences that wouldn’t necessarily be chosen using the standard means of narrowing down a selection for an editorial piece. One much-trumpeted yet arguably not so effective use of multimedia is the launch of VIVmag, one of the first digital-only magazines focusing its production around the soon-to-be available technologies of the ipad. For all its whistles and bells however, I can’t help but think that the information being presented in this sample article below is still appearing in standard blocks of text. Granted, the transition from block to block is cinematic, but that strikes me as more of a fancy page turn than a fully interactive approach using narrative innovation. One example of this is at 0:34 secs in, with the ‘You Might Get Aids’ header. Your comments welcome.
Now let’s move the spotlight to a couple of different online apps, the Survivors Connect Map and this incredible one of Haiti, courtesy of Ushahidi. Both are open to (better yet – dependent on) the public for submissions, displaying all data that is submitted in an unfolding narrative of the situation on the ground. This isn’t just news, it’s a tool for NGOs to more effectively channel their resources where they’re needed. Suddenly Haiti isn’t just another global disaster a million miles away – it’s heartfelt messages coming from specific addresses that make it feel like it’s happening next door. (Where did all those Haiti donations go, by the way?). A similar technology is available domestically through twitter, allowing you to search for specific terms used near a location, although presumably you have to go through following whoever you find before you can contact them directly. Of course, one thing missing from the real-time turnaround (as mention above) is someone to lead you through that data. But who?
Look no further than Edward Tufte, the ‘Da Vinci of data’, who has recently been appointed by the Obama administration to a committee tasked with presenting a coherent, intelligible layman’s guide to the Federal Stimulus package. And, more importantly, where all the several hundred billions of dollars of it went. Of Tufte’s many innovations are what are called ‘sparklines‘ – succint snippets of information, standing in defiant opposition to the cluttered complexity of a standard graph. One example of how fascinated we are by infographics, one of Mr Tufte’s specialities, is this one which was recently one of Digg’s top picks, despite lacking links or any substantiating evidence whatsoever.
What better way to kickstart this week than with a caricature of Jean Baudrillard spliced onto Tinkerbell’s body from a recent commission? 
Click here to view Jean in all his transvestite glory. Here’s a snippet from his Simulacra and Simulation (come on people, even The Matrix directors co-opted it) to explain Jean’s link to Disneyland:
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland: digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that “ideological” blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
Turns out Mickey’s a demagogue. For an arguably harsher treatment of Walt’s shrangi-la, checkout Luis Marin’s “Utopic Degeneration: Disneyland”. One of the many interesting points Baudrillard covers (hold tight for a seamless link) is the different phases of the image: 1 It is the reflection of a basic reality; 2 It masks and perverts a basic reality; 3 It masks the absence of a basic reality; 4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Recently I’ve been looking into the power of the photo as a conduit to “the truth” after being recommended Errol Morris’ blog at the New York Times (from where the series of below images is taken: Graphic by Dan Mooney for Errol Morris/ Photographs by Ben Curtis/ Associated Press). One question that always comes up in comics journalism is “aren’t you recreating what you imagine a particular scene to be?”, as opposed to photojournalists, who are presumably documenting what’s in front of their lens. Short answer? No. As the below images attest (aside from today’s sporadic fascination with all things Disney), the significance and ‘truth’ of an image is dependent on it context. Just like panels in a longer sequential narrative, the visual data in a photo can easily be subjected to myriad interpretations, depending on the information that it’s couched in. As Ben Curtis, the photographer from below, says: The caption is the thing that provides accurate context. And without an accurate context or with a misleading context, you can completely distort the meaning of an image.
Another interesting point Morris makes in a different post, “photography as a weapon“, when a neuroscientist reveals that approximately 30 to 50% of our brain is dedicated to visual processing. When text accompanies an image, however, the linguistic interpretation occurs in a different part of our brains, prompting a cognitive emphasis on the image over the text, even if the text is clearly telling us not to trust the image.
In the words of Dr Hany Farid from Dartmouth: “It raises a whole other level of information warfare…You intentionally put things out there just to know that the controversy in and off itself will help you make your point.”
It’s been a busy week since the cover went up on Monday – plans are afoot to secure distribution of the comic in Honduras, but more on that once it -finally- goes to print. After the success of the interactive cover vote last week, I’m launching more ways to get you, dear readers, to voice you own vitriol down the archcomix megaphone. The main way for now is through the forum I’ve set up on the Archcomix fan page here – go and post comments or share links/info that you want to see included in an upcoming piece that I’m working on about the Jewish lobby in the US. Any suggestions for a wordpress-friendly forum widget would also be good.
The hard copy of the Independent World Report also arrived this week, featuring my Chagos comic, as well as a moving photo journalism piece on African immigrants who are permanently stranded in Malta after abortive efforts to get to europe and have adopted a WW2 hangar as their home. Speaking of Chagos, for those of you from glorious Britannia who contacted your MPs about the Early Day Motion I mentioned last week, here’s to hoping the response you got was more successful (not to mention vague) than mine: “whilst I cannot commit to signing EDM 960 at this point in time, I will certainly give the issue my consideration”. Any chance the said point in time is after the elections have been and gone? The Chagossians’ plight has recently been added to with the introduction of a plan to turn the surrounding nature area around the base on Diego Garcia into Britain’s ‘Great Barrier Reef’. A big coup for conservation, but unfortunately Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s conservation focus lies on flora and fauna, and not the thousand or so remaining displaced inhabitants who were evicted or born in exile since the 1960s. Worse still is the fact that many people were duped into signing a petition for the creation of the said area, with no idea that the organizers had been forced into denying the Chagossians’ their rights in its establishment. More on this from the Guardian UK here. Speaking of marine conservation, here’s a great example of animation being used for edutainment – though is it informative enough to inspire/engage with someone with no background knowledge of the issue? Leave a comment and let me know.
As you’ll have seen above, the cover to the Honduran Coup: A Graphic History is now finished, and patiently awaiting a journey to the printers. There’s nothing quite like drawing a crowd of riot police to get you thinking about civil disobedience and the concomitant governmental responses, especially in conjunction with an unnerving yet fantastic piece in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine that I came across recently.
The article’s about the development and proliferation of non-lethal weapons for crowd control and ‘peaceful engagement’ of civilian protests, and cites numerous examples of these cuddly alternatives such as the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) and the neuro-chemical agent that reportedly played a pivotal role in ending the Chechen Hostage Crisis. Killing most, if not all, of the hostages in the process. Readers of this blog will also remember the LRAD’s role in the Honduran coup crisis, one which was actively denied by the de facto regime despite televised images such as this one (see left) being broadcast by Telesur. Its ear-shattering debut on US soil was at the Pittsburgh G20 protests, which you can witness below for yourself.
For the long wishlist of other techno-gadgets that every repressive government shouldn’t be without, click here. Granted, it’s from 2003 – from “Nonlethal Weapons: Terms and References,” a report published by the United States Air Force Institute for National Security Studies – and many on the list are still at the ‘proposal’ stage, but it’s good to see security officials really getting creative with their futuristic weaponised fantasies.
My personal favourite is under the ‘Holograms’ section entitled, Prophet: The projection of the image of an ancient god over an enemy capital whose public communications have been seized and used against it in a massive psychological operation. Doctor Manhattan eat your heart out.
Speaking of imaginative flights of fancy when it comes to security, Secretary of State Clinton is currently on a tour of central america and stopped off in Guatemala where she wished Honduran ‘President’ Pepe Lobo well and urged the rest of Latin America to take his government seriously. Or recognize them, for a start. She told those assembled (including Lobo himself) “We support the work that President Lobo is doing to promote national unity and strengthen democracy,” and went on to say that the US is restoring all aid to the country. No matter that the human rights situation in the country continues to worsen by the day, prompting first the Director of Human Rights Watch to write to the Honduran Attorney General and now nine members of congress to write directly to Clinton to investigate the abuses. Here’s their letter.
