Feral Beast: expense accounts

Showing posts with label expense accounts. Show all posts

Monday, August 20, 2007

Sheikh-up? Al-Jazeera accountants jailed

Pity the Al Jazeera English language field correspondents. Those on-air smiles look a little tight lately in Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington, DC;
It's not only because the splendid archive footage has all been run through and it's time to get more features in the can for the 24/7 feed. Apparently, foreign correspondents have griped that, in the scramble of obtaining all that new shooting, stacks of their monthly expenses were left unreimbursed. So it's not all non-stop glamour in tv news. Complaints fell on deaf ears at the Qatar-based television station for months. Finally it was revealed that most of the no-account accountants had been tossed in jail. Since broadcasts are not aired inside Qatar, at the insistence of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the money freeze had stayed a mystery. An inside source now tells Feral Beast that the Al-J's "liquidity problems" are getting sorted.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.