WASHINGTON, DC, 9 February 2011 — The “Backpack Documentary Expedition: Nicaragua,” is a 10-day immersion in the craft of character-driven documentary making. We follow American volunteers with a leading U.S. non-profit to the Nicaraguan town of Ticuantepe, just outside the capital of Managua. For me, it’s not just about teaching backpack video journalism, or documentary. […]
WASHINGTON, DC, 7 October 2010 – I was pleased but not surprised. Not even when she dropped me e-mail messages or phoned from places like Kabul or Kashmir. I became accustomed to it. To her success, that is. I knew Rebecca Byerly would be successful the first time I met her. She came to my […]
WASHINGTON, 3 October 2010 — It’s not every day that a university professor sees his student’s work in The New York Times. But that’s exactly what happened recently when I ran across a piece by Shaheryar Mirza, a former student in my Foreign Correspondence class. Shaheryar was kind enough to answer a number of my […]
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 […]
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
Following are comments I delivered last night prior to the screening of “A Mighty Heart,” about Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Daniel Pearl. A panel discussion with some of Pearl’s colleagues preceded and followed the screening, held at the Newseum in Washington, DC: “At no time is the free flow of information more important than […]