Posts tagged : "Journalism"

Kourosh Ziabari - Al-Monitor: Harsh verdicts issued against journalists and political activists show that the cost of advocacy for reform and civil liberties is still high in Iran despite pledges by moderate President Hassan Rouhani to change the status quo. Marzieh Amiri, a journalist with the Reformist Shargh, was sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison and 147 lashes last month. She was arrested while covering an International Workers Day rally in Tehran. According to Reporters Without Borders, she is now one of 10 female journalists behind bars in Iran. Another Iranian journalist recently handed a heavy sentence is Kioomars Marzban, a filmmaker and satirist who was convicted of security charges including...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: The detention of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by British police on April 11 has generated an international media frenzy. Assange has been sheltering in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012, having sought asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden where he was facing sexual assault and rape charges. The government of President Lenin Moreno revoked Assange’s Ecuadorian citizenship and, after months of coordinated efforts, asked the Metropolitan Police to remove him from the embassy premises. Julian Assange founded the whistleblowing website, WikiLeaks, in 2006 to expose corruption, human rights violations and war crimes. The publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, as well as a trove...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: Being a journalist is not an easy job. It has never been seen as an effortless and unproblematic profession. Journalists go to extreme lengths to report on sensitive and controversial issues in the public interest. They may find themselves personally engaged with the stories they cover and even risk their own wellbeing being affected by the amount of stress and anxiety. According to CareerCast, a job search engine, the role of a newspaper reporter is the sixth most stressful job in the world. So far this year, at least 45 journalists have been killed in line of duty, as reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Hundreds of broadcast, print and online media organizations are run by people...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Charles Dickens, the Victorian British author is remembered even today for his novels and novellas like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. I had the opportunity to interview Lucinda Hawksley, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dicken. She is a distinguished member of Charles Dickens’s family and one of his few living descendants. She is an art historian, public speaker and broadcaster specializing in literature, art, history and social history from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As a volunteer speaker of the Whales & Dolphins Conservation Society, Lucinda Hawksley has travelled across the world and appeared...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Seychelles is an archipelago country in the Indian Ocean and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. With a population of less than 100,000, it’s the 14th smallest country in the world. Seychelles, however, has a thriving economy and is practicing democracy, attracting international investment and receiving numerous tourists who want to visit its wonders. Seychelles won independence from the United Kingdom on 29th June 1976 and is a member of the African Union. Its vibrant economy developed from a mostly agricultural society to a market-based diversified economy but there are still problems such as unequal wealth distribution. An article in The Telegraph once described Seychelles as...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Working with children with autism is a challenge that few people embrace pro bono. Autism is a developmental disorder marked by difficulties with social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. Stereotyped behavior, compulsive behavior, ritualistic behavior, restricted interests and self-injury, problems in social development and communication are the major characteristics of children with autism, and absent support, these challenges can present long-term challenges for individuals. Melissa Diamond is an American social entrepreneur, community worker and writer who has founded and is the executive director of the organisation A Global Voice for...

Kourosh Ziabari - Medium: I chose an early career in journalism by virtue of my journalist family: my parents have been running a local weekly magazine in northern Iran for some 20 years now. Although I can’t say that I regret my choice of becoming a journalist, I should confess this industry has hit a stalemate in my country and those who remain committed to it are almost automatically following the advice embedded in one of the famous poems by Rumi, a 13th century Iranian Sunni poet and jurist who said, “I am not to give away your painful feeling; Or to quit loving you till the day I’m kneeling. Your only souvenir is a whole lot of hurting; Still, I won’t replace it with a certain healing.” Aside from not being well-paid,...

Courtesy of Laura Garcia Rodriguez Blancas. Taylor Mulcahey | February 28, 2018 Each month, IJNet features an international journalist who exemplifies the profession and has used the site to further his or her career. If you would like to be featured, click here. Kourosh Ziabari grew up in the newsroom of a small, weekly magazine — Hatef — which was one of the first local magazines established in northern Iran following the 1979 revolution. His father currently works as the managing editor, and his mother is the editor-in-chief. It was in this magazine that Ziabari published his first piece when he was just 8 years old. “It opened my eyes to a world full of papers, magazines, books and stationery, and I realized...

I must remember Not to say something that ruffles any feathers Not to give any look that shakes any heart Not to take a route, which is a detour Not to write a line, which causes offence I must remember that The days and daytime are all happy Everything is okay and fine It’s only my heart, which is not actually a heart Parviz Parastui (Photo: Cineplex.com / the man whose front view is not visible) 1- the terrible world we live in is full of irregularities. What’s the point in me complaining about them all the time when I can’t change anything, when I simply fail to correct myself, and I’m full of errors? I stopped complaining long ago, as quickly as I realised that the world is too hectic, too strange and too...

1- Admittedly, I'm not holding a press conference to announce the discovery of pulsating radio source. Jocelyn Bell did the task on such a day in 1967. I didn't have the chance to chat with her so far. However, in my old young days, I interviewed her supervisor, Prof. Antony Hewish, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974. Don't judge me based on that interview. The entire experience of approaching him, getting the interview, eliciting some of his unpublished photos and having it released by the Daneshmand Magazine , started on 30 September 2011 and came to a closure on 24 October 2012! Well, I'm confident serious journalism is not really such a struggle. The thing is that when you don't have the right editor...

Photo by: Laura Garcia @lauragrb Kourosh Ziabari - The Huffington Post: Christmas heralds the beginning of the New Year for those who celebrate it. There are millions of people who observe Christmas, not necessarily because they follow Christianity. They sometimes mark this occasion because of their cultural and hereditary ties to the festival. But it’s an unfathomable fallacy to say that Christmas is only dear to Christians or people living and celebrating it in places, which are geographically considered to be part of the ‘West’. Even in Muslim-majority countries such as Iran, there are Christians who happily observe Christmas, and there are non-Christian Iranians who joyously join them in celebration. Shops put on...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: On the second day of the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum 2015 held from June 22 – 24 in the German city of Bonn, a group of journalists, including me representing Iran Review, had the chance to talk with Dunja Mijatović, a prominent European expert on media law and regulation and OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media. OSCE is the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and is known to be the world’s largest security-oriented intergovernmental organization, working on a range of issues including arms control, human rights and freedom of press. OSCE’s member states come from various geographical regions; from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in...