18 JUNE 1979 — Working from a hotel in Managua during the weeks-long insurgency to oust the Somoza dictatorship, I traveled from city to city in Nicaragua, following reports of fighting. In the picture above, Sandinista fighters fire down a street in the city of Leon at National Guard positions. Leon was the scene of […]
NEW YORK, 25 June 2009 – I took questions following my presentation on “backpack journalism” at the Harvard Club on W. 44th St. in New York City. I also screened my recent piece, “Afghanistan: The Forgotten War,” which was broadcast last year by NOW on PBS. The event was closed to the public and only […]
7 JUNE 1979 — Before covering the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, I had rarely seen dead people outside of funeral homes — much less made pictures of them. But in the summer of 1979 I made lots of pictures of dead people. I still see some of them today in my mind’s eye. On June […]
David Coffey (left) accepts the American University-Associated Press Foreign Internship Award from School of Communication Professor Bill Gentile. Coffey, who is finishing a graduate degree in Journalism at AU, is leaving this week for a three-month internship with the AP in Bangkok, Thailand. AP, the world’s oldest and largest news-gathering organization, has a robust domestic […]
It was this time of year three decades ago, in the sweltering heat of a Nicaraguan summer, that I covered conflict for the first time. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) ousted the U.S.-backed family dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in a war that left some 30,000 dead. That’s Somoza above, outside his bunker in Managua, […]
I’ll be judging the Qatar University VidoetryFest 2009 Film Contest and Festival this month. Below are some comments I’ve prepared for the opening of the event. I’ll be judging the videos, many of them done in the backpack journalism model, online.http://www.youtube.com/get_player