Local bloggers and foreign correspondents: Podcamp Halifax presentation

How much do you know about what is going on outside Canada? Like really know? Sure, you've scanned the headlines and watched the National. You know some leader was overthrown in North Africa; things are really bad in Haiti still; nothing has changed in Afghanistan. If a Canadian was hurt or killed in any of those places, the Canadian media will have told you about that. But did they tell you what it is like to be a North African, a Haitian, an Afghani in the middle of these ongoing events? That's the kind of understanding the press has not been able to bring you. Until now.

In this presentation, Conrad Fox (that's me!) draws on his own (my) experiences as a journalist in Latin America and Nova Scotia to explore new ways of getting your international news fix from the perspective of those actually in the news. He explains the process by which traditional news stories are cropped and selected to tell a story from a Canadian perspective, and argues that online media can scoop up the bits left on the cutting room floor and send them to us in newer, more unsettling forms we had never imagined before. Want to know what it's like to live through Mexico's drug war? Turn off the TV, with it's cliche images of dusty border towns and corpses under sheets, and follow it as it happens on Twitter. Feel like you don't really understand what is motivating the conflict in the Middle East? Become an online diplomat. Didn't agree with that last interviewee on the CBC? Boot up Skype and give them a call.

As immigration to Halifax increases, the theme of understanding and perspective across borders is of growing urgency to the city. If anyone doubts its importance, just ask an immigrant whether they think today's media have done a good job at explaining other cultures to us. Conrad's presentation doesn't offer a panacea, but hopes to take the ongoing squabble between old and new media to higher ground. Through vivid examples and gripping stories from his and others' journalism, he hopes to demonstrate how both new and old media could offer us so much more than "just the facts."

Type rest of the post here