Yesterday I launched two archives on Groundviews that are unique in Sri Lanka. The blog post below, first published on Groundviews, explains the archives but what I wanted to simply ask here is why the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) itself, or mainstream media in Sri Lanka, don’t have the imagination to do this [...]
Archive | January, 2011
How much of dopamine did the coverage of Sri Lankan floods release?
Long before the recent devastating flooding in Sri Lanka, I have been interested in how media, including new media able to sustain an empathetic interest over the long-term on complex humanitarian emergencies. However multi-faceted and in-depth it may appear to be at first, local and international media approach disasters as episodes, concentrating coverage when it [...]
Introducing Long Reads on Groundviews | Long-form journalism in Sri Lanka
I formally launched the Long Reads section on Groundviews today. This section brings to the site long-form journalism found in publications such as the Economist’s fantastic Intelligent Life quarterly, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker and the New York Times. Inspired by the Longreads blog, these articles offer more in-depth deliberation on key issues covered on Groundviews. Articles currently published include: Some reflections [...]
New media and investigative journalism
Kick-started my mid-career lectures at the Sri Lanka College of Journalism for 2011 on an appropriate topic – investigative journalism and new media. In 2008, Lasantha Wickremetunge, was the senior most journalist in Sri Lanka to be murdered. He and his soi disant paper, the Sunday Leader, pretty much defined English language investigative reporting in [...]
Sri Lanka inside-out: Cyberspace and the mediated geographies of political engagement
Save for the treatment of Tamilnet in Mark Whitaker’s book on Sivaram, I know of no other Sri Lankan website other than Groundviews that has inspired rigorous academic study. From as early as 2007, content on Groundviews has been studied and quoted in academic journals, books and media reports. Today I was forwarded Sri Lanka inside-out: Cyberspace [...]
Senior academics commend citizen journalism in Sri Lanka
The unique Special Edition Groundviews ran a year after the end of war in Sri Lanka was recently critically acclaimed recently by Prof. Sasanka Perera from the University of Colombo. Fire and Storm: Essays in Sri Lankan Politics is the latest book by Prof. Michael Roberts. Michael was trained in history and the social sciences at [...]
2010 in review
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 74,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at [...]
RSF’s 2010 media report on Sri Lanka ignores new and web media
Constituting what in popular blogging parlance is a ‘massive fail’, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) does not even in passing acknowledge the pivotal role of web and new media in Sri Lanka’s media landscape over 2010. In Less anti-media violence in 2010 but more obstruction and self-censorship, the only hint of web media is in the [...]
