Armenia: Frontline Club

The Frontline Club, the London-based media club which seeks to promote independent and conflict reporting, has invited me to become one of their bloggers. Given that the club’s use of new media recently won it a Guardian Media Innovation award I’ve naturally agreed.

Frontline bloggers are mostly drawn from foreign correspondents, war reporters and freelance journalists - some highly experienced, some relatively new to journalism. The basic premise is to give ‘interesting people in interesting places a platform to talk about interesting things’ - anything from the price of fish in the market in Mogadishu to life in a newsroom in Caracas to unravelling the complexities of the conflict in Darfur.

[…]

Many of the bloggers who currently blog at fromthefrontline have featured on TV, radio and in national newspapers as a result of their blogs. Most have received offers of work, including one who produced a sixteen minute documentary from Afghanistan for BBC Newsnight on the back of his blog. We also won a Guardian Media Innovation Award earlier this year.

I’m not sure yet how this will affect content on this blog, but the plan would be to link to posts made on their blog and it’s likely that the opportunity to blog for them will lead to different types of entries. Anyway, more details will come as of when, but in the meantime, information on the Frontline Club is here and there’s an article on them in the New York Times here.

Vaughan Smith leaned forward in his chair and winced as a scene from “Baghdad E.R.,” a documentary film about an American Army hospital in Iraq, rolled across the screen. “It’s pretty gory,” he said as the camera zoomed in on a soldier’s eye, from which a surgeon was about to remove a bit of shrapnel.

[…]

After the deaths of two of the three other founders of the agency, Mr. Smith set up the Frontline Club in London. Since it opened in 2003, the club has become a popular way station for war correspondents, as well as a busy forum for screenings of films like “Baghdad E.R.” and discussions of current affairs and journalism issues, including the safety of reporters.

‘‘We saw friends get killed in the course of their work,” said Mr. Smith, 43, who was shot twice himself while covering the Balkan wars. ‘‘We thought their work was undervalued and wanted to stimulate debate about the role of journalists.”

Incidentally, there’s some great stuff from South Ossetia here and to be honest, I’m quite excited about blogging from Armenia for them. Watch this space.