Graduation Day!

The last couple of weeks have been some of the busiest of my life. We've been working 12 hour days helping our students finish their final video projects and preparing our final web product, The Tiziano Project | 360 Kurdistan.

I have much to share with you but for right now I just had to show you all our latest video, representing the culmination of our project here in Iraqi Kurdistan. Our mentor Grant Slater produced it and it's pretty much one of the best things ever.

Enjoy!

Plagiarism? Piracy? Not here.

If there's one thing I keep struggling with in Iraq, it's the idea that copyrights, for anything, mean nothing.

It's all fun and games when you're driving by the Max Toast's golden arches or picking up a fresh copy of Sex & The City II from the bazaar.

But in my opinion, many people here have a totally different, and from my view, incomprehensible opinion on personal rights to one's own work and information.

Here's a quick story for you. Just a few days after arriving with Iraq, Jon and I had a meeting with the Hawler, a local paper here. The editor gave us a bunch of their weeklies to flip through as we were talking and as Jon started checking out the first of the stack, he stopped dead. "This is my picture!"

The editor leaned over to check out the page.

"I took this two years ago, in Erbil!" Jon was incredulous. The paper had been printed two weeks before.

The editor took the paper, looked at it and laughed. "We should have at least given you an attribution!"

[Jon's snap of his snap published without permission, attribution, or compensation.]

Similarly, after publishing a recent blog on the Huffington Post, I got a message from a Kurdish journalist thanking me for writing the post and letting me know that he was going to translate it into Kurdish and publish it in his magazine. There was no question of permission or consultation, just a friendly FYI over Facebook that it would be printed for Kurdish readers in a local magazine. Blog posts are often reposted with attribution online -- they're the type of content that fall into the hazy milieu of things that should be spread quickly and easily, but written by people who are often working just as professionally as print journalists or photographers. It's not uncommon to have a blog republished on five or 15 other sites. So in this case I swallowed my usual objections and asked politely for a link to see where my work was being placed. I got the link to it today, which, considering it's for my article, I have no problem showing you guys here:

[You can see a larger version by checking out Page 2 at this link: http://en.calameo.com/read/000206241ef82f5e7d7a6]


But as you can imagine, with two such recent run-ins with copyright infringement, I find it a little hard to swallow that cavalier attitude toward taking people's work, online or in print. Plagiarism is plagiarism, no matter what you're stealing or how you're using it, if you don't give the owner credit.

I'm having a hard time explaining the importance of this to our students. For our first assignment, we asked each of them to create an interactive timeline about their family history, to get the basics of telling stories in a visually engaging way. We asked them to collect stories from their families, as well as family photos and pictures of artifacts from their homes to help them tell their story.

Imagine my surprise when, as each student stood to present, they proudly showed us their family's stories accompanied with some of the most iconic photos from the last 20 years in the region. There wasn't any shame there -- many students had used the same photos as each other in their timelines. It wasn't like they were trying to hide the fact that the photos were stolen from the Internet. It was just that there was nothing wrong with it. We requested all the students remove photos that weren't theirs from their family histories.

During the second draft presentations, same thing. Internet photos abloom, all across the timelines. Again, we said, why would you want someone else's photos in your family history? Take them off.

So now I'm wondering how to make this lesson stick. It's hard in a place where journalism is undergoing a sort of Renaissance, where papers are plentiful and successful in their own ways, to explain that it's this sort of glib attitude toward the value of people's work, toward reusing it without proper attribution or compensation and in the process devaluing it, is a huge contributing factor to what's killing American newspapers.

I'll be the first to admit I am definitely a hypocrite in this - somehow it seems way worse to me to see a photographer or a journalist struggling to pay the bills have their work directly stolen, than to see a movie or brand be pirated. Having a face on that money lost, that career waylaid, makes it harder to be blase about piracy and plagiarism. It would be hard for me to see someone's picture on the back of a book jacket before I photocopied from the book's pages. 'Cause I'm right there with them.

I want to tell my students, take these people's work, and you're taking their living, and then no one can enjoy the fantastic pictures they shoot. But I'm not sure how to make that lesson sink in yet, and I'm a little afraid that when it does, it's because the journalism industry here will have been troubled by this attitude just as the American industry has, and that Iraqi journalists will be struggling to pay the bills because of it.

Journalism 101: Who, what, when why and how

Today was our second class at the Tiziano Project. It's been really rewarding to see all of our hard work toward organizing this workshop materialize into students who are excited about learning from us.

I've been lead teaching the last few classes, which have concentrated on the basics of journalism - how to interview, write an article -- and social media techniques to easily display that information online.

I have to admit, while I'm passionate about sharing my knowledge, I knew that today's lesson wasn't going to be fun and I felt a little bad about subjecting my students to three hours of hardcore basics. Today's class was a lesson I reviewed over and over again through j-school and each time I did, all I could think about is how I wanted to break all the rules my professors were giving me or how I wanted to get on to the fun stuff.

Now I feel bad for sighing and yawning my way through those classes. Standing up in front of the students, I hated knowing I was about to bore them to tears.

Luckily, the students all took it in good stride, and asked a lot of great questions.

And in a really neat way, teaching reporting to people who speak English as a second language made me focus on how to drill down on those raw components of journalism that will translate into any language: How to build trust with your sources and your readers, and how to tell a story clearly, truthfully and powerfully.

When I was a kid, I used to live in an area of Los Angeles where wildfires burned through annually. Every year my family would evacuate and watch from a hotel TV as reporters stood in front of burned homes just a couple of miles or blocks from my house.

Once, a reporter announced on camera that my whole neighborhood was on fire. Another time, a reporter announced that my elementary school had burned down. Neither were true. But there was an excruciating period of waiting, in that hotel room, where we didn't know for sure what we were coming home to and we didn't know whether we could believe what we had just watched on the news.

It was these seeds of uncertainty, of anger, of a childlike certainty that the people I was watching could do better, that made me want to be a journalist. I didn't want to watch or read something and wonder if it was true, to sit and wait until I knew for sure. I wanted to see things for myself, to know what true. By being a journalist, I could be the first person to know things, and I knew I could trust myself to report stories to other people with honesty and accuracy.

So while today's lesson may have been dull as all hell, I'm glad that I now have the chance to pass on my childhood resolution to others who really want to learn.

Why Kurdish Journalists Can't Write

Since my arrival in northern Iraq, I have been continually surprised by the amount of support The Tiziano Project has received from locals. I have heard again and again, from people on the street to editors and heads of news organizations, that the press around here needs some help.

There are virtually no independent news organizations in northern Iraq. This may not surprise you. But what might is that freedom of the press is not Kurdistan's biggest media problem.

There is an audience for news here in a way we can't imagine in the U.S. Historically, the people of this region have been great readers. I was speaking with someone just today that told me that there's an old saying that goes: "The Egyptians write, the Lebanese print, and the Iraqis read."

This man remembered reading books as a child that simplified complex issues, like the theory of relativity. And everyone in his family read voraciously. But as he grew older, things began to change. Foreign books were banned or hard to come by. Papers were forced to publish positive articles about the regime. These lack of freedoms are the things we as Americans often imagine as Iraq's state of affairs under Saddam Hussein.

Then the U.S. invaded and handed power to Iraqi Kurdistan to become an autonomous region. (Kurdistan is part of Iraq but is run by a separate government than the rest of Iraq. Okay, poli sci lesson over).

It's at this point where, ironically, a whole new slew of problems started for the media in Kurdistan.

Anyone remember back to America's own journalism history? How cheap printing and distribution allowed for hundreds of opinionated people to start their own presses and share their views with the rest of the country? And then a few politically motivated heavy hitters began backing the newspapers they liked or made their own to make the news what they wanted people to hear?

That's what's happening in Kurdistan right now.

As soon as the limits to what could be printed here were lifted, everyone had something to say. Then, just like in the States, these papers started to solidify or dissolve according to how much money they had behind them. And in this region, that money comes from political parties. Right now, I'm told that there are dozens of newspapers printed daily, and that there are at least four major newspapers that are openly backed by political parties. (This applies to broadcast media too, but I'll stick to discussing newspapers here.)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The affiliations for each paper are clear - people know what slant they'll get depending on which paper they pick up. And these political parties can also protect journalists from criticism - or worse - if they publish articles on societal problems or expose corruption within the government.

The real problem with many of the papers here, people tell me, is that there are some real ethics issues within the papers themselves. There are a lot of published criticisms and accusations that are unsourced, poorly researched, and written to pick a fight rather than to promote public discussion. This, no doubt, has to do somewhat with the papers' political affiliations, but many attribute it to simply bad journalism. There's a thirst here for meaningful political and societal criticism. Of reporting that goes past finger pointing and parses crucial issues in a way that will help the majority find a solution.

In my conversations with people here, I haven't quite drilled down to why this is so hard for journalists here. One would imagine they would want to avoid tabloid-style accusations and commentary lest they end up like a recent Erbil journalist who was assassinated after he published a satire piece about President Barzani's daughter. While the journalist's death was publicly condemned, many have said that the journalist wasn't operating ethically to begin with - publishing highly critical but poorly sourced articles for months under a nom de plume, concluding with an immensely insulting (in this culture) article that in American terms translated to "Your Mama" to Barzani. He, along with everyone else around here, knew insults like that weren't to be taken lightly.

But people have another major problem with Kurdistan journalists, and it's the first thing they'll tell you about. Kurdish journalists don't know how to write. I can't read Kurdish but I'm told that many articles are so badly written that they don't make any grammatical sense. An editor recently told me that he hires twice as many copyeditors as journalists at his paper to catch all the errors his writers make.

But it's not their fault.

Why? Remember that Kurds have been suppressed in this region for decades, and in some neighboring countries, the use of Kurdish is still illegal. Many adults in this region grew up speaking Kurdish but learning academically in Arabic. When Kurdistan became an autonomous region, they happily turned from the Arabic of their "suppressors" and busted out with Kurdish signs, Kurdish taught in schools, and Kurdish literature, songs and poetry that is celebrated. Kurdish is celebrated, but until now, not widely written by Kurdish people.

To make things even more complicated, Kurdish itself is a sticky business. Kurds have been geographically separated in recent years into four separate nations, and the language has grown apart into dialects that are almost totally different languages in themselves. In some places, Kurdish is written in Arabic-style lettering. In others, Latin letters are used. Even in parts of Iraq, Kurds can't understand one another. This is common for many languages with regional differences - such as German, where Swiss German, Austrian German and Bavarian German are radically different from one another. The Germans solved this by instituting a universal "High German", which pretty much all German speakers can understand.

Unfortunately, there is no "High Kurdish". Though all schools in Kurdistan now teach in Kurdish, textbooks must be printed in separate dialects according to region. And poets and literati who insist on writing in "pure" Kurdish, which uses latin letters that represent the roots of Kurdish from the Ottoman empire (before Arabs introduced Arabic lettering), are not understood by the vast majority of Arabic-schooled Kurdish speakers.

So, Kurdish writers are left to wing it, to make up the grammar and spelling and proper usage as they go along. I can only imagine this could make for some really compelling literature -after all, it was the flexibility of the English language that gave Shakespeare such leeway for brilliance in his day- but when daily news depends on clarity and brevity, overcoming a basic problem like an unstandardized language is no small feat.

As a news editor, one of my main jobs is to make sure that writers comply with standards - standard dictionary definitions, standard grammar, standard AP style. I double check sources, question iffy statements and make sure that everything that comes from the publications I edit are watertight so that people can get a straight story they can trust. As I learn more about the challenges of writing here, I can only admire the tenacity of the journalists and editors who are trying to apply Western standards of journalism in northern Iraq. Keeping the "six honest men" on the straight and narrow is hard enough without inventing a language as you go.