Woo hoo!

My piece on the blurring of NGOs and news organisations has just gone online at the Nieman Journalism Lab. What a great end to 2009 - and in a week where all my pre-Christmas planning has gone completely awry, a great break....

The Nieman Journalism Lab, a project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard is running a series on NGOs and the news at the moment so there's plenty of stuff to read there at the moment (and should speed up my next research considerably :)

Totally chuffed.

Dispatches from Disaster Zones

I spoke on a panel at the Red Cross's Dispatches from Disaster Zones symposium earlier this week - Charlie Beckett's account here. Our panel was particularly lively thanks to provocative statements from Sam Kiley who wrote the following piece Do starving Africans a favour - don't feed them. He got into a debate with the DEC's Brendan Parry about whether NGOs had been misusing the word famine...it all got rather hot under the collar. Thoroughly good fun.

Meanwhile the Guardian has a really interesting piece here about how Africa is leading the west in terms of mobile phone journalism....