Afghan web, cont’d
Wednesday, October 10th, 20011,000 journalists in Afghanistan, but not one weblog. Can we fix that?
I emailed Courtney Kealy last week about my journalist’s urge to be where the action is. Courtney is a freelance photojournalist whose work has been Page A1 stuff for the New York Times and ABC News. Since she’s made a career of getting to hotspots (currently Beirut), I asked her what it would take to get to Afghanistan as an independent journalist so one could go around reporting direct to the Web.
Her response: You’d need a passport, about $10,000-15,000 in cash plus a credit card, and whatever tech gear it takes to upload. She has the whole thing figured out - you fly into Pakistan, check into the Islamabad Marriott (or wherever), and then get in line with a lot of other journalists for the helicopter ride across the border.
I’ve spent a lot of the past week talking to people who recently lived there and experts on the regional communications infrastructure. The tech turns out to be easy: You can post Web pages to a US-hosted site from a laptop with a satellite phone, just as people have been
doing it from Burning Man for years. There are ISPs in Pakistan that offer satellite access that works in Afghanistan. As a fallback, you can phone in your updates via voice to someone who types them in, and send photos from your video cellphone, just as regular news reporters are doing.
To be honest with myself, I know I won’t be going. Remove all the lame excuses (job, marriage, bills, etc) and there’s still my health, which makes it hard to get to the corner store sometimes. One can only imagine me in a desert combat zone without my asthma meds.
If I had ten grand handy I’d just pay Courtney’s way to go do it. An experienced war zone correspondent such as she would be best - but one willing to let the people who live there upload their own first-hand entries in whatever language is best, instead of just quoting them in little soundbytes the way news reporters do. After all, if you don’t post long, unedited ramblings about whatever’s on your mind, it’s not a weblog, is it. (hey, that makes this my first real post here)
That’s the thing it seems people either understand or don’t when I bring this idea up: There are now millions of people online who will read a clumsily written, clunkily laid out first-person web site instead of trusting anything that looks like “the media” to them. Are they excessively cynical? Sure. But if you want to communicate effectively with someone, you have to do it on their terms, not yours.
Related links:
Kabul Online - Internet Access in Afghanistan
