Last night I joined Demotix (“the news by you”) to see how to use the site.  ( I signed up because my students were having problems posting content to various citizen journalism sites. The problem seems to be that most of these sites want images – still and video – and are less interested in text.)

Based in London, Demotix is particularly good with international news, so I posted a photo of a street poster I noticed this weekend in LA’s Echo Park neighborhood supporting the Iranian students who have been protesting the disputed Presidential Election in that country since June. (Demotix did a terrific job facilitating citizen content from the June protests).

Demotix has an interesting model that offers to license your work and share profits 50-50 if a mainstream media outlet buys your content.  It’s kind of like having an agent.  This makes it significantly different from sites like CNN’s iReport or YouTube, where you do the work of collecting the story or image and they make the money.  Think about it.

Random observations:

• Very easy sign-up.  I gave my real name.  If you are trying to get your user generated content out, why use a fake one?
• They wanted a Paypal account in order to pay you if anyone does buy your stuff.

I have been especially struck by Demotix’s efficient dissemination tools.  This morning, I had two emails from them, one that was  written for easy forwarding via email for the old schoolers,  and a second one encouraging me to use any social media networks I have to distribute the link to my post.   The share link gave me a huge range of options, many of which I have never heard of! One was to WordPress, and when I clicked that one, it dumped the url for the link to my photo into this post.

What can I say? I’m a complete sucker for sites that describe their mission this way:

“To give the man and (often more importantly) woman on the street a voice. Whether they’re in Azerbaijan or Zanzibar. A space where they can tell their stories, build communities, and get their news out to the world. We see Demotix standing on the barricades of free speech and civil society.”

Truth be told, I was feeling discouraged lately, what with the devastating cuts to higher education in California.  I don’t know what our future holds, but what I do know is that I work with some talented people:

• Grad student Kenya Young has landed a producer’s position with NPR’s
  

  Kookie & Claire working hard on their theses

  “Weekend  All Things Considered” in DC.

• @Lizohanesian, an alum of our MA program,  was hired this month as reporter-editor on the webside of the LA Weekly.
• Esha Momeni, our grad student who was jailed in Iran last fall, will be speaking at Amnesty International’s  Southern regional meeting in Atlanta this weekend.  Esha will also speak at CSUN Monday Nov. 9 at the Northridge Center in the student union at 5:20 p.m.
• Graduate student Seth Koury showed a roughcut of his amazing documentary, “Sound  of Beirut” to some faculty members earlier this month.  Guess this means we gotta let the guy graduate.
• Graduate student Sara Alamdar will defend her thesis in a few weeks.  She studied coverage of Iran’s religious minorities by the government-controlled Tehran Times to see if the reporting changed under a reformist president versus a  conservative president.
• Colleague Linda Bowen is serving as President of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.  We attended the First Amendment Coalition’s event at Southwestern Law last Saturday where the LAT’s lawyers scared the beejebus out of journalists wanting to use Twitter or Facebook.
• Sandra Kukla’s thesis comparing AP coverage of the Gaza crisis with Malaysia’s Bernama wire service is nearly finished.  Um, right?
• Claire Rietmann-Grout is busy editing and researching her upcoming thesis project, a documentary about her experiences as an American softball star who travels to Switzerland to play for a “club” and finds a different way of looking at the game and herself.

Anasa Sinegal

Recent CSUN grad Anasa Sinegal documents her search for a job in what may be the worst economic climate since the Depression on the wonkster employment blog, Workforce Developments, this week.   Anasa is one of our top students, an Emmy winning former television journalist, who won thesis of the year in our department last spring.  As HuffPost columnist Laura Chapin writes, the current 18-35 generation is facing a difficult economic future.   In the meantime, Anasa is continuing her public intellectual work and will join former classmates John Daquioag and Esha Momeni on a panel later this fall at Cal Poly’s Global Citizenship conference.

Sarah Rosenblum, a graduate from a few years ago, recently landed a new job as events coordinator at the G2 Gallery after an extensive search in the turbulent SoCal job market.  A very active gallery in Venice with lots of cool events,  G2 focuses on environmental issues.  Sarah’s former classmate, Treepon Kirdnak, who teaches at Bangkok University in Thailand, is the co-author of a new study, “Siam Snapped:  Uploading Thai Muslims to Flickr” (w/ me!) that I will present at a conference at UC Riverside on Saturday.  Treepon works a grueling schedule at his university and I’ve been amazed at how he’s still been able to come up with so many fresh insights.   Must be something in the Som Tom.

Another graduate of our program, Liz Ohanesian, who has been pounding LA’s streets as a freelance writer and racking up the bylines at LA Weekly, will talk about how she has built a free-lance writing career in one of my journalism classes tomorrow morning.  I am going to try to live stream with my cellphone via Qik.  Wish me luck!

Our graduate student Esha Momeni is back from Iran after spending nearly a month in Evin prison and then being under a 10-month travel ban — all for simply interviewing the courageous women in the One Million Signature Campaign for women’s rights in Iran.  Below are some of the articles documenting her return.

ABC’s Lara Setrakian, who has been one of the best reporters on the election protests and Green Movement in Iran, interviews Esha about her experiences during the election unrest this summer.  (Like a lot of other people, I became aware of Lara’s work via her Twitter posts as they appeared on iran.twazzup.)

In an interview with Fox News 11, Esha noted that her goal — bringing a new image of Iranian women to the US — was accomplished even if her thesis materials including her videos were confiscated by Iranian security forces.  Multiple reporters here and in Washington, D.C., from Fox maintained an interest in Esha’s story. While the national outlets pushed a confront-Iran frame, the local reporter, Christina Gonzalez, was quite responsible and fair in her reporting.

The Daily News’ Connie Llanos profiled Esha. Connie was one of the first reporters on the story when Esha was imprisoned and I was struck by how much attention she paid to getting it right while giving consideration to Esha’s safety.

In a second story, Connie  reported on Esha’s classmates’ relief at her return, quoting Anasa Sinegal who, along with Kara Lawton, turned their master’s thesis into a project documenting their work to free their friend.

Called the Please Free Esha Project, it won the thesis of the year award in the Journalism Department, and is intended to serve as a both an historical record (see complete text version at Oviatt Library) as well as an online resource for other human rights activists and their supporters.

The news of Esha’s freedom came first via a website for the One Million Signature Campaign in California and where you can see a photo of her being greeted at the airport. That news was followed by the Cal State Northridge’s Daily Sundial’s text and video reports. The first photos (which one journalism professor said reminded her of Abercrombie and Fitch ads!) came from CSUN’s talented Jonathan Pobre.  These appear with the Daily News story.

AP also interviewed Esha.  They assigned the story to Shaya Tayefe Mohajer who speaks Farsi.

The Los Angeles Times ran a press release quoting CSUN’s president.  Photos of Esha were initially hard to come by (unless you were willing to use Jonathan’s shots) and they choose to run one of the old photos of Esha from last fall.

For the big picture, the Department of Journalism has noted that

Esha’s imprisonment brought the department together for a common cause – the safe return of our student – and reminded us how important it is not merely to seek the truth but to support each other in our quest to bring the world news of injustices and oppression no matter where those stories take place or how difficult the pursuit of them may be.

And for the many people who have worried on Esha’s behalf about the loss of her thesis project, not to worry.  She already has a new one in the works — a photography exhibition.  Not surprisingly, it’s about human rights in Iran, it’s creative, it’s original, it’s surprising, in short, it’s Esha.

My graduate student Esha Momeni who was held for nearly a month in solitary confinement at the notorious Evin prison in Tehran and then banned from leaving Iran for almost 10 months has returned home to Los Angeles.

Esha retained her indomitable spirit even in prison, where she sang in her cell despite the admonitions of prison guards.  You can hear her talk about this, the Iranian

election and more in an

amazing interview at the Daily Sundial.

Since her arrest last October, the very message Esha hoped to bring to the world — that Iranian women are strong and courageous instead of weak and passive as they are often stereotypically depicted — has been upended by the images spilling out of Iran: Women as a key element of the massive protests.

The Campaign for Equality, the women’s rights organization Esha was studying in Iran when she was arrested, provides an update on her return.

The LA Daily News has the story.