Advice for independent journalists covering violent demos

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq95DvG8ZWE] Journalist Mark Covell was beaten unconscious by Italian police during the 2001 Genoa G8 summit. He speaks here about the power of independent media and how independent journalists should buddy up, train and prepare to cover potentially violent demos so as to keep safe. He was speaking before a screening of Black Block, […]

Mimi Chakarova talks about making “The Price of Sex”

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q7w4v1rheA&w=560&h=315] Documentary film-maker and photojournalist Mimi Chakarova talks about her film, the Price of Sex, which screened in London this week as part of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012. Chakarova describes how it took her four years to persuade some of the East European women who’d been sold into sex slavery to tell […]

The Price of Sex

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZGPEclrEEM&w=560&h=315] I’m set to interview Mimi Chakarova today, the maker of this film about the sex trafficking of East European women. It’s a tough tale about how poverty makes young women in former Soviet bloc countries vulnerable to the promises of well-paid work as waitresses abroad, only for them to be trapped into prostitution. […]

Gonzo journalism? Sounds more like the brighter future to me

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I enjoyed this recent video interview by Tanya O’Carroll, a fellow volunteer at visionOntv, with mobile media maker and professional blogger Christian Payne. The man  talks great sense – I agree completely with his thinking about a future for journalism that includes the many citizen journalists in addition to the full-timers. Just the sort of […]

The bloody realities of self publishing

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Self-publishing is a grind. Don’t kid yourself that you can just kiss off that bestseller, throw it up on line as an eBook or paperback then lay back and count the royalty cheques as they roll in, particularly if you forgot to put in the teen vampires chapter. Here in the grunt room at Fraudcast News, […]

Uploading smartphone videos to multiple sites

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I have been volunteering with visionOntv for the last few weeks, helping out with their project to encourage the widest possible distribution of video for social change. That has involved me doing and learning ultra-light video shooting and publishing techniques that I hope to be able to share with other citizen journalists working to transform […]

Undercurrents – advice from the veterans of radical video activism

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7AbVs6_fwA&w=420&h=315] Paul O’Connor of Undercurrents gave an inspiring, enlightening and entertaining talk about the potential of radical video film-making at the Bristol Radical Film Festival 2012. This animated film is a neat depiction of the why in all this. It’s all about trying to break up the effects of corrupted government and their collusion […]

Activist Video training in Bristol’s Stokes Croft

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0bTIh5hqmo&w=420&h=315] I shot this brief, smartphone film this morning using a visionOntv video-making template, warming up for a day at the Bristol Radical Film Festival in Stokes Croft. This week-long event has a hoard of film treasures, meaning the 15 or so participants in today’s training workshop didn’t need any explanations about why our […]