I’ve updated my portfolio with new vids from the West Coast, and I think I might use this space to tell the story of how my cameras were stolen and will be (hopefully) found. That will come someday soon.

SCPR's new headquarters in Pasadena, Calif. My new home base. (Photo courtesy of the Pasadena Independent)

Six months ago, I arrived in D.C. with a bit of unfinished business and an uncertain future. Part of that uncertainty rested in my own conflicted conceptions about what I wanted to become as a journalist as I finished graduate school. I have made some form of a living for four years on words alone. And the empty notebook has led me to amazing places in the pursuit of filling it.

But in the last two years, I have gravitated toward visual journalism as a powerful medium to do basically the same thing I had done previously with a word processor. I found myself consuming more images and sounds from news sites I originally queued up for their written content. I bought my own camera and tried to copy the best of what I saw. This time, the camera won out. I’m more than thrilled to head to Los Angeles and join the staff at Southern California Public Radio where I will wear at least five different hats: videographer, staff photographer, multimedia trainer, fundraising content creator and outreach through social multimedia platforms.

My first semi-journalism job was as a lowly unpaid grunt at my hometown public radio station. And this is a great opportunity to join a news outlet with big plans. Public radio is an exciting part of the journalism landscape right now. Seeking an audience on the web is essential to the future of radio and visual journalism is a big part of that equation. The web is an increasingly visual space. But in terms of video for radio, there are no rules. Video efforts at NPR nationally have led to very interesting results that I’ve been following for years.

SCPR is growing and flourishing in this new environment. And I’m excited to help them produce video content that will add value to their news report while helping to push the on-air conversation forward. The efforts will range from short news pieces to the types of short web documentaries that I know, love and post with frequency in this space. My hope is to create a video report that is local in focus – LA is a fascinating place, an ecosystem unto itself – but larger in terms of storytelling arc. The station is part of American Public Media based in Minnesota and also a part of NPR’s Argo network, which shares content among member stations. I’m excited to be under the banner of both these entities.

I will continue to post to The Long Telegram about issues and inspiration related to my journalism career. I have really enjoyed my time in Washington, and I wouldn’t be anywhere without the support of my friends and family here who have helped put me on this new and exciting path. Can’t wait to see what’s next!

In the name of the 17th of February Revolution we declare the following:

1. We are constructing a united, free, civil, sovereign, Libyan state that emphasis the unity of Libya and equality for all.

Full text after the jump.

2. Drafting a Constitution that derives its legitimacy from the will of the people of the uprising of 17 February based on the following:

- Respect of human rights
- Respecting all International treaties
- Guarantee of general freedoms
- Separation of powers
- Independence of the Judiciary system
- Setting up free national institutions that would guarantee the participation of all sections of the Libyan society
- Peaceful, fair and free elections
- The protection of people lives and property on Libyan soils of nationals and expatriates.

This declaration is the essence of the 17th of February uprising. In the spirit of the uprising we are requesting all States, institutions, International and regional organizations and human rights organizations to perform their humanitarian obligations to stop any further massacres, genocide against the Libyan civilians in our Capital city Tripoli and all other Libyan cities.

The 17th February Revolution

بيان انتصار ثورة 17 فبراير المباركة
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

بسم الدماء الطاهرة الزكية لشهداء الثورة الليبية التي فجرها شبابنا البواسل سلمياً في جميع مدن وقرى وواحات ليبيا العزيزة وانضمت إليها مختلف فئات وشرائح المجتمع وأسقطت الدكتاتورية بكل أدواتها ولجانها.

وبالنظر لما قام به هذا النظام من إطلاق النار بكافة أنواع الأسلحة واستخدام العنف المفرط ضد المتظاهرين العزل المسالمين من أبناء الشعب الليبي واستخدام فرق الموت من المرتزقة الأجانب لقمع هذا الشعب، ونظراً للجرائم الوحشية والانتهاكات الصارخة لحقوق الإنسان وحرياته ولكافة الأعراف والمواثيق الوطنية والدولية، عليه نعلن:

1- بناء دولة ليبيا الموحدة الحرة المدنية كاملة السيادة.
2- وضع دستور يستمد شرعيته من إرادة الشعب وثورة 17 فبراير المظفرة ومستنداً على احترام حقوق الإنسان وضمان الحريات العامة والفصل بين السلطات واستقلال القضاء وبناء المؤسسات الوطنية على أسس تكفل المشاركة الواسعة والتعددية والتداول السلمي الديمقراطي للسلطة وحق التمثيل لكل فئات وشرائح الشعب الليبي.
3- التأكيد على وحدة الشعب الليبي والتراب الوطني وتماسك نسيجه الاجتماعي.
4- احترام كافة الاتفاقيات والمواثيق الدولية أسوة بأعضاء المجتمع الدولي.
5- حماية وصيانة أرواح وممتلكات كل المتواجدين على أرض ليبيا من مواطنين وأجانب.

إن هذا الإعلان يعبر عن روح ثورة 17 فبراير الساعية لإعادة بناء الدولة الليبية على أسس الشرعية والقانون والمؤسسات المستلهمة من نضال الشعب الليبي البطل عبر تاريخه وما يقره بإرادته الحرة.

وفي الوقت ذاته نهيب بكافة الدول والهيئات والمنظمات الدولية والإقليمية ومنظمات حقوق الإنسان لأداء واجبها الإنساني لإيقاف المجزرة وجرائم الإبادة الجماعية التي ترتكبها فلول النظام المنهار ضد أبناء وبنات وأطفال شعبنا الباسل الأعزل في عاصمتنا طرابلس وباقي مدننا وقرانا.

وإذ نعلن هذا البيان إعلاناً لانتصار ثورة 17 فبراير الشبابية وقطعاً للطريق على الانتهازيين والانقلابيين فإننا نتطلع إلى قرب تحرر عاصمتنا من ربقة الطغيان.

عاشت ثورة 17 فبراير الشبابية السلمية المباركة

عاشت ليبيا جمهورية حرة موحدة

My friends The Workweek from Norman, Okla., are releasing their album tonight. This is an in-session recording of their haunting track, Ain’t So, with my friend Marcus on the trumpet. I’ve posted three other tracks from their album. Listen up, y’all.

A Kurdish official conducts an interview from the Citadel overlooking downtown Erbil, the site of a reconstruction effort. (Photo by Grant Slater)

Last week, the revolutionary fervor that has flared up from Morocco to Iran found its way to Iraqi Kurdistan. What has been a bastion of stability in a war-torn country now faces the possibility of spreading civil unrest largely because economic gains in recent years have failed to trickle down to an increasingly educated middle class. I spent the whole of last summer with a team in Kurdistan training a promising group of aspiring journalists to cover their own society in a situation just like this. And as the protests become more pronounced, I find their stories and knowledge essential to understanding what could happen in the coming weeks.

The protests began in Sulaimaniya, the region’s second largest city near the border with Iran, and have swelled to include thousands of demonstrators in the city’s main square. Sulaimaniya is viewed as the intellectual capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, a home to artists, university professors, poets and a less stringent interpretation of Islam. It is also home to the second largest political party, which formed an alliance more than a decade ago with the current ruling party. Another smaller, more liberal party known as Change – or Goran in Kurdish – also participated in the most recent elections and has its base in Sulaimaniya.

So far, four people have died, three protestors and one police officer. The protests have followed a familiar pattern for those watching the movements in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain. Kurdish youth have set up Facebook groups, some predating the protests and some new, where they share information. This one arose after a recent protest in honor of a 14-year-old that was killed by government forces. According to local Kurds, the government has sought to restrict movement between Sulaimaniya and the capital of Erbil to the north. It has also approached and threatened people who posted anti-government status updates in recent weeks.

There is a sense that things could go either way at this point. The Kurds appreciate their stability and have an extensive security apparatus walling them off from the rest of Iraq. But at the same time, many feel a sense of hopelessness born through resentment of a booming economy for a select few and general economic malaise for most. If the protests spread to Erbil, things will get serious. Follow me and The Tiziano Project on Twitter. If the protests grow, we will be watching.

In the meantime, here are some quick facts to get you up to speed quickly:

Why is Kurdistan different than the rest of Iraq?

Luckily, The New York Times dropped a fairly comprehensive suite of articles on the current state of play in Kurdistan in simpler times – like January – before dictators started dropping across the Middle East. The biggest development in the region has been the influx of Turkish cash to fuel Kurdish development and trade. This is what is driving the wealth of the few along with those Iraqi oil revenue sharing agreements we’ve all read so much about in recent years.

This is evident in the billboards leading up to the mountaintop fortress that is Saladin, home to the Kurdish president and now a place that a mustachioed Turkish real estate speculator would like you to consider buying a villa. That cash allows some Kurds to shop at upscale malls like the one in this video while some can barely find jobs with a college education:

The increased trade has come with a slight denouement of the conflict between the guerilla PKK movement, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, and the Turkish army. As recently as this summer, nighttime bombs from Turkish fighter jets and cross-border raids by itinerant PKK fighters remained the norm along the porous border between southeast Turkey and Kurdistan. Today, the PKK leader is striking a more conciliatory tone.

“Our youths are always ready, hot-blooded and combative, but we want the Kurdish problem — as a nation’s problem, as a people’s problem — to be solved not by guns, but by dialogue.”

The PKK are still kicking around in the mountains as evidenced by this haunting video from The Times’ Stephen Farrell (who spearheaded the video effort out of Tahrir Square), but their role has diminished and the Kurdish government has kept its hands off them for the most part.

It’s fairly evident wherever you go that Kurdistan is not Iraq.

What do I need to know about Kurdish history?

The Kurds have a long history of ethnic and political strife. Different dialects of Kurdish are spoken in each of three largest cities in Iraqi Kurdistan. Different religious mores are upheld. And different tribal affiliations hold sway. The most salient storyline leading up to the present day starts in 1992 when the Kurds gained a relative amount of autonomy under the protective umbrella of U.S.-led no-fly zones. By 1994, the relative peace devolved into a civil war that pitted the two major political parties and their regional affinities against each other.

The fighting left thousands dead as it drew in both Iraqi forces from the south and the Turkish army in the north. The remnants of this conflict provide a base for the current protests and explain why the clashes began in Sulaimaniya, not the capital Erbil. A U.S. brokered peace agreement in 1998 ended the hostilities and Kurdistan has gone on a development spree ever since, far outpacing most of Iraq, with implicit U.S. backing. The two parties remained in an alliance and cooperated to help U.S. forces in the 2003 invasion. A joint parliamentary list of the two main parties garnered 59 seats in the most recent parliamentary elections, down from 78 seats four years earlier. The remainder went largely to the Change party, which is based in Sulaimaniya. There are also strong minority Christian, Turkmen and other communities that enjoy religious freedom and some measure autonomy in Kurdistan.

Who are the major players and how do they connect?

KDP – Kurdistan Democratic Party – The current ruling party headed by the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani. There are two dynastic families in the Kurdish region of Iraq; the Barzanis are one of them.

PUK – Patriotic Union of Kurdistan – The Sulaimaniya-based opposition to the KDP which became an alliance after the civil war ended in 1998. Jalal Talabani, the scion of the other dynastic family and head of the party, serves as the president of Iraq as part of their power-sharing agreement.

Change (Goran) party – The PUK-KDP alliance opened the door for another party in the most recent parliamentary elections where Goran won 25 seats. The party came from PUK’s left and ran on economic issues. It capitalized on a general sense of economic stagnation among those outside the region’s ruling elite which is centered in the capital, Erbil.

Kurdish youth – Like Egypt or Tunisia, Kurdistan has enjoyed enough prosperity recently to allow this generation to escape the cycle of violence and gain access to more opportunities. The students we taught and the people I interacted with are savvy to regional politics and opinionated about the future of their people, whom they identify as Kurds, not Iraqis. As Saddam’s influence waned in the region, so has the teaching of Arabic, further setting the region apart from its southern neighbor. But with education comes a sense of frustration that they are bogged down in a system that is not built to help them advance. They don’t identify strongly with the political struggles between the KDP and the PUK. I can attest to the fact that they use Facebook incessantly, judging from my e-mail inbox.

If you want to know about the world they see, I suggest you check out their work for yourself.

And here are some shots from my time in the region if you want to see more of what it looks like:

They were set to release an album and I agreed to make not one, but two, music videos for them in return for their volunteering to be test subjects. And so we did. That was nearly two years ago. Promises, promises. The aptly named and long-awaited debut comes a week from today. So listen to the amazing songs and ignore my video hackery. I’ll come back here and give you the link to download when its released.

Somewhere in those many months, The Workweek made friends with another swell videographer. But they were kind enough to let me play trombone on this song, so I’ll forgive them for cheating on me.

Facebook revamped the look and presentation of their photo albums tonight, going to a dark-background shadowbox effect. The photos also seem to gain a bit in size. The change is striking and sends a couple of significant messages about the direction of social photography online. It’s another shot across the bow of Flickr. As cameras improve, people view photography as something accessible and easy. The shadowbox effect – almost exclusively an artistic rather than social move – is an attempt to capitalize on the democratization of high-quality tools for photography. This is Flickr’s core cache as a sharing site where amateur photographers have built a community around aesthetic concerns.

In late September, Facebook began offering high resolution photo uploads with a warning that it could take ages to send off a batch of images, a warning to the party pic crowd with an editing aversion. The new look departs distinctly from Flickr’s blanched background and sides with several prominent photography sites. If 600 million Facebook users grow accustomed to seeing their photos in the dark, then is black the new white?