By Heba Albeity
Lebanese participant's multimedia website that documents torture of detainees won the top prize in a competition among ICFJ participants. The site began with a course on ICFJ Anywhere.
Ali Ghamloush built an interactive prison into his website, Zinzana
(“Prison”), in order to give visitors a feeling for what Lebanese
prisons are like. The site also includes a map with information on the
country’s prisons, firsthand accounts from tortured detainees, photos
and videos, official documents and an explanation of prisoners’ legal
rights.
“I want Zinzana to be a social platform for those voiceless prisoners
who have been abused and tortured in detention,” Ghamloush said. “There
is a serious need to document cases of torture as evidence for human
rights violations committed by some investigators.”
Ghamloush was one of six journalists in the training program who each
won $3,500 in seed funding for their projects. The trainers judged
Ghamloush’s as the best project, and he also receives a trip to the
United States, where he will get as further digital journalism training
and networking opportunities, including attending the South By Southwest
digital media conference in Austin, Texas, in March.
The ICFJ program, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, began with a distance learning course, “The use of digital tools in public service reporting,”
for 60 journalists from all over the Arab world. They learned to use
social networks, mobile applications and services, digital maps, online
video production and emerging technologies in their reporting.
Participants proposed online multimedia projects they wanted to
pursue, and the best 28 were chosen for a boot camp in Cairo, Egypt, in
June. During the boot camp, they had intensive, hands-on sessions and
one-on-one time with digital journalism experts to move their projects
forward. Online mentoring continued when the participants returned home,
and they attended a second boot camp in October to get help finishing
their projects.
Ghamloush started using digital tools on his blog, which led to him launching Hibr Newspaper,
a online, citizen-journalism news outlet that has trained more than 750
young Lebanese on citizen and digital journalism. Ghamloush trains
youth on critical thinking as well. This led him to coordinate an online
project, I Love my Vote, which aims to educate Lebanese about the country’s elections and engage them in electoral reform.
In addition to working for Hibr Newspaper, Ghamloush co-founded Alt City,
which provides a physical and a virtual space for Lebanese social
entrepreneurs to gather. Ghamloush was also active in the recent wave of
Arab revolutions. He created a website, “Back to Tahrir” where many Lebanese and Egyptian bloggers and activities worked together to cover the Egyptian revolution.
Ghamloush said he learned a lot in the ICFJ program on using
multimedia and mobile tools, designing content, investigative
journalism, photography and online platforms development. He applied
this knowledge to the way he and his colleagues at Hibr Newspaper cover
news.
Now, he wants to share what he learned beyond his immediate
colleagues. He is already helping civil society institutions start to
use the new techniques.
“I’m compelled to communicate the journalistic skills I learned from ICFJ through nationwide training sessions,” he said.
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