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!

Excuses, excuses.

I've had a high learning curve as an instructor in the last few months and I've quickly learned that one of the hardest parts of being a teacher is corralling students into doing what they're told, making sure they do it and shooting down excuses. This can also be the most hilarious part of the job.

In short, it feels a little like this:

[via The Daily What]

Sigh.

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.