Publications and research

I’ve been commissioned and appointed to research and write a variety of articles, reports and publications over the past 15 years, some of which I hope have had helpful things to contribute to the media/tech/funding ecosystems.

My publications of various kinds, including those below, can be found through Google Scholar, ORCID, ResearchGate, and MuckRack, as well as cross-posted to this and the Macroscope sites.

• I was asked by the Forum on Information and Democracy to serve as Lead Rapporteur for their Working Group on the Sustainability of Journalism. I led the final report, which called for A New Deal for Journalism, and wrote summaries and presentations that distil the main recommendations of the report.
• How to fund investigative journalism (Deutsche Welle Akademie, 2019)
• In 2018, I worked with the Ariadne Network of funders, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, and the David and Elaine Potter Foundation to prototype a guide for how Ariadne members could think about and engage in funding journalism and media. Ariadne kindly decided to make the resulting internal paper, A Guide to Funding Journalism and Media, open-access so that the work could be used by other funders and advocates.
• For three years (2019-22) I wrote a monthly newsletter for the Journalism Funders Forum unpacking different topics and places in the media philanthropy field (also cross-posted at Macroscope).
• After leaving WITNESS in 2010, I spent the next year working with my former colleagues looking at the new landscape of visual imagery, social media, technology and human rights. I was Lead Author on the resulting 2011 report, Cameras Everywhere (my co-authors were Sam Gregory, Yvette Alberdingk-Thijm, and Bryan Nuñez).
• I researched and wrote a 2007 report for the International Broadcasting Trust on the internet’s impact on coverage of the wider world in UK public service broadcasting: Reflecting the Real World 2 (with a chapter from Prof Stephen Coleman and Dr Myria Georgiou).
• With Francesca Silvani, I wrote a 2005 chapter on the internet’s impact on local radio journalism in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia: Local Radio in the Information Society (Panos/SDC)
• The first time anyone let me anywhere near a publication of any kind was as a contributing researcher on Francesca Silvani’s 2002 chapter on local radio’s appetite for global stories on local topics: Audio and the internet in Eastern Africa.

Interviews / expert contributions

[2023 – This section is rather out-of date – and I will update it in due course.]

– on changes in the news, journalism and information landscape, in The Economist (2011)
– on technology and human rights, in The Financial Times (2011)   |   For a MobileActive/USAID report (pdf)   |   For an internal Nokia report on ‘phon-tography’
– on WITNESS and the Hub by Loic Le Meur   |   At Etech 2009 #1, #2, #3   |   At GFMD in Athens (2008)   |    In PRINT Magazine   |   On MSNBC   |   For the State Department website   |   For PBS Mediashift   |   On Rocketboom   |   By Prof Molly Land in the Harvard Human Rights Journal
– as a jury or selection panel member on the Amnesty UK Media Awards 2011   |   Knight Foundation Community Information Challenge 2010   |   BAVC Producers Institute 2009   |   One World Media Awards 2007   |   We Media Game Changer Awards 2007

Journalist / blogger / curator / editor

In 2006, I worked with WITNESS, the New York-based human rights organisation co-founded by Peter Gabriel, and the international blogging network Global Voices Online to write and edit a blog about the emerging phenomenon of citizen-filmed human rights video around the world (it won a One World Media Award in 2007). In 2007 I joined WITNESS full-time to manage a human rights video-sharing platform called the Hub. As well as overseeing the editorial direction of the Hub, I wrote for and edited the Hub blog, and then a separate WITNESS blog. In mid-2010 I co-wrote a series of posts for YouTube and the WITNESS blog about human rights video in the digital age with Steve Grove, Director of News and Politics at YouTube, and in 2009 I curated a Human Rights Week for the online anthropology project In Media Res. More recently, I’ve written for WITNESS on the potential impact of face recognition technologies on human rights and free expression.

Between 2001 and 2006, I worked in the UK for Panos London, working with developing world partners to devise and manage journalism and media development projects, like AfricaVox (bringing 7 African journalists to cover the 2005 G8 meetings for UK and African media), for which I conceived and edited the blog.

I also retain an interest in cultural journalism – in the early 2000s I wrote a series of reviews and profiles for UK film website and magazine Kamera, and in 2010 interviewed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips for Brooklyn’s BOMB Magazine.

Advertisement