The Tigris River flows through the ancient town of Hasankeyf in southeastern Turkey.
The documentary film, Life in Limbo, has won four honorable mentions at the Archeological Channel’s Film and Video Festival in Eugene, Oregon. Directed by Sakae Ishikawa, the film portrays life in Hasankeyf, a small town in southeastern Turkey where a proposed dam project threatens its existence. Filmed by me and edited by Sakae, the film features the music of Christopher Tin and Omar Faruk Tekbilek.
Life in Limbo won: Honorable mention in Best Film competition by jury, Honorable mention for Cinematography by jury, Honorable mention for Music by jury and Honorable mention in Audience Favorite competition.
I have decided to step down from my position as Director of Video at The Los Angeles Times. It was a difficult decision to make.
Journalism of the highest caliber continues to be practiced at the LA Times on an hourly basis by a staff of amazing visual journalists and writers. My time at the organization was filled with challenges, excitement and incredible experiences. I learned more than I thought I ever would.
But despite my happiness, I began to miss documentary filmmaking.
As a documentary filmmaker, I have been privileged to report, photograph and witness some of the most important stories and topics over the past decade. I have filmed in extremist mosques in Pakistan weeks after the attacks on September 11th, covered the invasion of Iraq as a unilateral journalist, followed a wounded U.S. soldier home to Pennsylvania, reported on ethnic tensions in northern Iraq, told the story of America’s secret war in Laos, covered various parts of the war in Afghanistan and have followed an artist placing a sculpture on a rocky outcropping in Iceland to honor an extinct bird.
Filmmaking and storytelling is my passion. Documentary filmmaking now faces an unclear future, and as I follow my passion to make films, I will be continuing the search for sustainability in visual storytelling. It has been a true honor to help guide a talented staff of video journalists at the LA Times over the past two and a half years, but it was time once again to return to the field.
Advertising Age online has a short story about the plummeting rates for advertising online amid serious market downturns. The range, explained in a helpful slideshow at the bottom of the story, goes from nearly zero CPM (cost per thousand views) to well over one hundred dollars per CPM.
“The slideshow…culled from agency buyers and media sellers, is far from scientific, but gives a good sense of who can still charge bank and why.”
The takeaway: Organizations with specialized content (The Wall Street Journal, WebMD) or those with big audiences (Yahoo, Aol) command the higher rates. Makes sense.
What happens to one’s social media accounts after death? MyWebWill, a start-up company in Sweden, is trying to address the problem of handling the online lives of people after they die . VentureBeat‘s Kim-Mai Cutler sat down with founders Lisa Granberg and Elin Tybring to get an explanation of the service.
The Sun newspaper in the UK has a brilliant video describing the high-tech attributes of its hand-held device.
On a related note, the French technology company, Tebaldo, has announced a semi-flexible, black and white electronic paper. Editorweblog.org has a story about it here.
A bronze sculpture of the Labrador Duck sits in Brand Park in Elmira, New York, near the site where the last living survivor was seen. (photo by Scott Anger)
The Lost Bird Project, which memorializes five North American birds driven to extinction in modern times – the Carolina Parakeet, the Great Auk, the Heath Hen, the Labrador Duck and the Passenger Pigeon – has a launched a site. Continue reading »
