Postcard front for Lowertown SantaCon V

nigelparry.net undertakes publicity for the event including press release writing, the website’s design and content management, and print materials including posters, and postcards.

Lowertown SantaCon is half spectacle, half pub crawl in the historic Lowertown district of Saint Paul, MN. Come as Santa, come as an elf or reindeer or get creative and come as a Santasaurus, the SantaChrist, a Hanukkah Chicken, a Kwanza Ham…you get the picture.

The Fifth Annual Lowertown SantaCon 2012 will be held on Saturday, December 15th. Visit LowertownSantacon.info for more information.

The Independent Citizen Police Review Board in the City of Pittsburgh, PA, was established by a referendum amendment to the Pittsburgh Home Rule Charter on May 20, 1997. Since the inaugural Board convened in December 1997, the Independent Citizen Police Review Board has promoted responsible citizenship and professional law enforcement through mutual accountability. The site is a resource for people interested in relations between civilians and police, contemporary issues related to law enforcement and the operations of the Pittsburgh Independent Citizen Police Review Board.

The CPRB’s former website was hosted centrally on the City of Pittsburgh’s main site, requiring updates to pass through a webmaster. Built in WordPress with the Genesis framework, the new site can be managed from in-house by CPRB staff. Design and implementation by Nigel Parry.

Visit Pittsburgh’s Citizen Police Review Board site at cprbpgh.org.

On September 13, 2012, nigelparry.net celebrates the launch of the 2013 Saint Paul Almanac—the indispensable seventh edition of the friendly guidebook to Minnesota’s capital city and Saint Paul’s eclectic community storytelling book of record! The Almanac also hosts multiple spoken word events series each year, and conducts community outreach, including to high schools and prisons.

nigelparry.net has provided web design, publicity, and content and multimedia management services to the Saint Paul Almanac since 2007. For the last two years, nigelparry.net has become increasingly involved in the print edition of the book, offering consulting and photo editing.

This year, the 416-page 2013 Saint Paul Almanac is again available in full color with over 160 photos and illustrations.

Detail from the Downtown Saint Paul map in the 2013 Saint Paul Almanac.

Our growing Saint Paul City Guide offers up-to-date listings for Art Galleries, Bookstores, Museums, Libraries, Historical Sites and Tours, Parks and Nature Reserves, Bars and Restaurants, Coffee Houses and Tea Shops, Food Trucks and Street Food, Deli Grocers and Food Co-ops, Sports and Recreation events, and Music, Dance, Theater, and Performing Arts venues.

Sample pages from the datebook in the Saint Paul Almanac.

Stories are at the heart of what we do

The Saint Paul Almanac is a literary campfire around which the diverse Saint Paul community gathers to share their stories.

2013 community editors at work. (Photo by Dan Tilsen)

High school students’ work appears alongside writing by grandparents, and first-time writers appear next to Saint Paul literary greats such as Garrison Keillor and Max Shulman.

Every person’s story is one unique part of a larger puzzle. When pieced together with all the other stories in the Saint Paul Almanac, the book transforms into a magical overview of Saint Paul’s interwoven cultures and communities, a tapestry of neighborhoods and favorite haunts.

The 2013 Almanac includes stories about jailbird ancestors and ice palaces, first kisses and school bullies, flood-threatened weddings and matchmaking worms, buses and bicycles, steamboats and cars, brave kids and wise elders, new immigration experiences and generations of Saint Paul memories, Rondo recollections and Hmong dreams, Irish ghosts and 1920s brewery workers, Bob Dylan’s piano skills and one roadkilled iguana—the latter two apparently having more in common than you might suspect!

Detail from the Events Listings in the 2013 Saint Paul Almanac.

The 2013 Saint Paul Almanac is a reliable companion for the endless exploration of our beautiful city, and a thoughtful gift that readers will reference all through the year!

Launch Events, Readings & Purchase Information

Join us at the 2013 Saint Paul Almanac Book Release Party! On September 13th, from 7 to 9 p.m., join us at AZ Gallery, the Black Dog Coffee and Wine Bar, and Clouds in Water Zen Center for readings, artwork, food, and Almanacs. The reading features Saint Paul Poet Laureate Carol Connolly, Kofi Bobby Hickman, Diego Vázquez Jr., Saymoukda Vongsay, Tish Jones, Tou SaiKo Lee, Loren Niemi, Brenda Bell Brown, Kemet Imhotep, and Clarence White.

The Saint Paul Almanac Readings series follow the September 13 launch party, throughout September to November 2012 in coffee bars around the city, featuring writers published in the 2013 Saint Paul Almanac reading their poems and stories. Events are free and all ages. Copies of the new 2013 Saint Paul Almanac will be available for purchase at the launch party and readings.

The 2013 Saint Paul Almanac also sells for $17.95 online at www.saintpaulalmanac.org (including S&H) and will be available in independent and mainstream bookstores—including Common Good Books, Subtext, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com—after September 13, 2012, for $14.95.

The 2012 Saint Paul Almanac was the winner of the “Travel” category in the 22nd annual Midwest Book Awards.

Each year, the Midwest Independent Publishers Association holds the Midwest Book Awards competition for excellence in books published the year before. The awards recognize creativity in content and execution, overall book quality, and the book’s unique contribution to its subject area.

Now in its sixth edition, the Saint Paul Almanac features essays, poems, photos, maps, and listings of events, bars, restaurant, theaters, and other cultural venues within a datebook format. Available in full color for the first time and—another first—includes gorgeous, hand-drawn, poster-size, pull-out maps of the City of Saint Paul and Downtown!

The 2012 Almanac features 129 stories and 180+ photos. Contributors include literary giants, everyday residents, students, journalists, new Americans, and lovers of Saint Paul who live in other corners of the world.

nigelparry.net offers consulting to the Almanac team, designed and maintained the website at saintpaulalmanac.org — and undertakes photo editing and visual consultation for the print edition of the Saint Paul Alamanc.

Executive Director of the Saint Paul Almanac Kimberly Nightingale prepares for a fundraiser Thursday at the AZ Gallery in Lowertown, St. Paul. (Pioneer Press: Joe Michaud-Scorza)

Going into its sixth year, ‘Saint Paul Almanac’ reflects its founder’s passion for ethnic inclusiveness

By Mary Ann Grossmann, Pioneer Press, 13 September 2011

 
“Saint Paul Almanac,” the only publication of its kind in the country, is going into its sixth year with a few innovations.

The 2012 edition, with more than 180 photos, is available in full color for the first time. It includes a hand-drawn, pull-out map of the City of St. Paul and downtown.

Kimberly Nightingale, founder/publisher/executive director, calls the chock-full-of-information paperback “a literary campfire” that draws together St. Paul’s neighborhoods and ethnic groups.

The nonprofit almanac is a datebook and calendar, a resource for finding public places and festivals, and a place for poets and writers to tell of everything from going to the Pig’s Eye Island dump to why East African immigrants refer to Skyline Towers apartments as “Titanic Towers.”

Detail from Roberta Avidor's hand-drawn map of Downtown Saint Paul.

Nightingale had been away from Minnesota for years when she returned in 1989 with her now ex-husband, with whom she had two children. (She was married in July to Dan Tilsen, who is a grandson of writer Meridel Le Sueur.)

“I was struck when I came back to St. Paul by how segmented the neighborhoods were,” Nightingale recalls.

“I saw the city becoming international but didn’t see a place, as far as media, where we could have that togetherness I remembered in Tokyo. The beauty of living with people of many cultures is that you learn from each other. Sometimes, when you don’t have that, there are feelings of mistrust and miscommunication.”

Nightingale’s idea for a city almanac took shape when she was an editor for nine years at Llewellyn Worldwide, which publishes almanacs on a variety of topics.

“I thought a city would be perfect for an almanac,” she recalls. “A city is a mishmash of people, cultures, buildings, and an almanac is a way to put different elements in the package, from everyday life and historical stories to recipes. It was imperative to do this with literature in mind.”

Read the rest of the article on the Pioneer Press website and visit the Saint Paul Almanac at saintpaulalmanac.com. Learn more about the 2012 edition of the Saint Paul Almanac.

And once every several years nigelparry.net gets a facelift. Each time the process is like pulling teeth… with feet. Mostly because your own site is the last one you have time to work on.

I knew that I definitely wanted the new site on WordPress, which is the in-house CMS of choice when building client websites—open source, feature rich and benefiting from a large developer community. That would open up a lot of possibilities with the site.

I wanted to strip down my business site to the bare essentials—a basic overview of my career, experience and focus. I already knew what I wanted—a modernization of the previous nigelparry.net site.

And I didn’t want to be the one to design it from scratch. This WordPress premium template framework was already very close to what I was aiming for—clean, professional & minimalist.

I typically develop WordPress sites on the Genesis theme framework by StudioPress, which I have worked with since April 2010. Sites designed in the last year and a half, including the Saint Paul Almanac and Changing Attitude are using that robust and well-supported theme framework. We’re ready to build you a fantastic WordPress website any time you’re ready!

So this site is redone but still under development. As time goes on, I’ll offer more detailed portfolios of some of the projects I’ve worked on, and write some more.

If you look back through the Blog, you’ll find news of projects I’ve been working on, press releases for nigelparry.net client projects, and some writing about the Interwebs. It’s that last part, and some general blogging, that this site will hopefully see more of.

So, fingers, um… toes crossed, eh?

Nigel

The top of the site prominently displays the key services that the Teacher Support Network offers, from helplines to online coaching and an InfoCentre with over 1,400 factsheets relating to issues faced by teachers.

Teacher Support Network consists of a group of independent charities and a social enterprise in the United Kingdom and the United States. The organization provides practical and emotional support to staff in the education sector and their families.

nigelparry.net consultants Ken Harper and Nigel Parry worked on the project, which offers a clean, professional and dynamic design delivered with a full set of viral tools, fully-compliant RSS feeds and Google sitemaps. The site was launched in August 2008.

Teacher Support Network last night won the Charity Times award for the ‘Best Use of the Web’ at the publication’s prestigious Annual Awards Dinner in London.

Both the nomination and win come as a result of the successes of the charity’s website, which was relaunched in August last year. The new site is full of content and enables visitors to access Teacher Support Network’s key services easily and quickly.

From left: Hannah Essex, Head of Communications & Business Development; Julian Stanley, Chief Executive; Sally Baker, Client Experience Manager; and Andrew Lyons, Digital Media Manager.

As a result of the relaunch, interactions with teachers online increased from 17,056 during the summer term 2008 to 26,719 in the same term in 2009 – an increase of 57 per cent.

Presenting the award, judge and digital design agency Fortune Cookie Chief Executive, Julie Howell, commended the site’s interactive nature, content and production values as well as the fact it was produced on a modest budget.

Services available on the site include regularly updated news, useful information and the InfoCentres, which contain over 2,000 factsheets covering a range of issues, from advice on disruptive behaviour to tips on improving a teacher’s CV.

In addition, the site empowers teachers to establish contact with the charity’s professional coaches and counsellors via its Online Support Services.

The site also contains a popular online ‘Stress Test’, links to enable teachers to sign up for Teacher Support Direct, the charity’s weekly newsletter, and other useful information, such as the online Starting out Guide for Newly Qualified and trainee teachers.

The website is constantly improving and expanding. Since the award nomination, another interactive tool has been launched to help teachers look at the balance between a wide range of areas in their lives and help them improve their wellbeing. The ‘Wheel of Wellbeing’ gives teachers the opportunity to reflect on the state of their wellbeing and identify areas of their life they would like to change. Since its launch on the 26 August 2009, it has been used over 580 times.

Teacher Support Network Chief Executive, Julian Stanley, said: “We are thrilled to have won this award from such a highly-regarded publication as Charity Times. This is a fantastic achievement for the charity and a reflection of the hard work and innovative spirit of our team.

“Our online services are a fundamentally important aspect of our work. Interactions via our website now amount to over 90 per cent of the total across our group. We believe it is crucial for us to remain at the forefront of delivery via the internet in order to best serve the magnificent profession of teaching.”

Visit the Teacher Support Network website at http://teachersupport.info

nigelparry.net has been a proud sponsor of the Festival since 2005. Nigel Parry undertakes photography, publicity support, and web/print design services for the Festival.

The 2006 event promises to provide entertainment that is funny, uniquely original and politically insightful. The Festival — which has three components: Sketch Comedy Nights (comedic theatre), Stand-Up Comedy Nights, and a Short Comedic Film Night — has served as a launch pad for emerging talent while providing a much-anticipated forum for the presentation of new works.

Poster design

This year’s participants include Waleed Zuaiter (The Public Theater’s Mother Courage and Stuff Happens), Leila Sbitani (Host of Nickelodeon’s Hi-Jinks), from Los Angeles comedian Aron Kader (Axis of Evil comedy tour), Hend Ayoub (the new movie opening October 27 Death of an American President aka “D.O.A.P”), Festival co-founders Dean Obeidallah, a comedian who received rave reviews for his one man show I Come in Peace which premiered at the 2006 NY Fringe Festival and co-producer/co-star of Comedy Central’s The Watch List, and Maysoon Zayid, comedian and actress, who has been featured on NBC’s Nightly News, MTV, and As the World Turns.

For more information, and to purchase tickets, visit arabcomedy.org

Diaries section of the Electronic Lebanon website.

The website — found at http://electronicLebanon.net — has published over one hundred articles, including diaries, opinion, analysis, and development-related information since Israel’s war against Lebanon began on July 12th.

“At the sound of the first bomb that hit quite close to our home,” wrote Rania Masri on July 16th, “my cousin’s youngest son, in mere seconds, went from his strong boyish bravado-demeanor to that of a frightened little boy. He threw his ice cream cone away, and got strong stomach pains. At the sounds of the next bomb, he ran and hid under a table. I wondered how the children in the south and in the southern district of Beirut and in Ba’albeck and in Gaza were withstanding the constant noise and terror.”

“I hear it from my neighbours and friends,” wrote Maha Damaj from Beirut on July 16th, “from phone calls coming in from loved ones abroad. I hear it inside my own head. We all just feel so helpless. How exactly does one face indiscriminate attacks from the air, land and sea? A sense of claustrophobia overcame me when all routes out of Lebanon were being cut off, one after the other. I wasn’t even thinking of leaving, but their moves succeeded in making me feel trapped. My solution? Call a friend living abroad – how trapped can I be if I can still communicate with the outside world? As trite as that might sound, it worked. The magic of psychology.”

Electronic Lebanon represents the latest in a 10-year continuim of alternative news projects by members of the EI team to bring voices from Middle Eastern warzones to an international audience.

EI’s Nigel Parry headed the Birzeit University team that published the first alternative news website from within a warzone in history, from the Palestinian West Bank town of Ramallah during the September 1996 Clashes: http://nigelparry.net/consulting/archives/254

During Israel’s “Operation Defensive Shield” in March/April 2002, the Electronic Intifada team presented the only reports from residents within Ramallah when it was put under Israeli closure, even to the press. CNN’s Michael Holmes was literally the only mainstream journalist inside the town during its closure, making EI’s contribution unique: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article442.shtml

And finally — in the alternative news moonshot — EI launched Electronic Iraq in February 2003 at http://electronicIraq.net to offer reports from peace activists and independent journalists in Baghdad reporting through a satellite modem during “Shock and Awe”: http://electroniciraq.net/news/1.shtml

In 2003, the ADC (“the NAACP for Arabs”) “Voices for Peace” award was presented to EI and eIraq “in recognition of its commitment to bringing the concerns, voices, and experiences of the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples to audiences the world over via the Internet.”

Electronic Iraq and The Electronic Intifada have received requests for archiving from both the Library of Congress and the British Library (the UK’s “Library of Congress”).

EI has seen more than 323,000 visits and over 1,228,000 page views* since the start of Israel’s invasion of Gaza on June 27th, and Israel’s war against Lebanon on July 12th. Since July 12th, EI’s website has seen over 127,000 visits and 511,000 page views. On July 17th alone, the site saw 29,000 visits to the site and 124,500 page views. Prior to the current crisis in the Middle East, visits to the site have tended to average at 10,000 visits daily and 40,000 page views.

Visit Electronic Lebanon at http://electronicLebanon.net to hear voices from on the ground.

* As of 9AM EST on 19 July 2006. Stats are one day behind.

ABOUT EI

The Electronic Intifada (EI) is a not-for-profit, independent publication committed to comprehensive public education on the question of Palestine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the economic, political, legal, and human dimensions of Israel’s 39-year occupation of Palestinian territories. EI provides a needed supplement to mainstream commercial media representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Visit EI at http://electronicIntifada.net

“The Palestinian CNN” – The Jerusalem Post

“EI is… something quite spectacular …a highly professional site.” — David Bowden, The Financial Times (U.K.)

“The Electronic Intifada is trusted” — Alexander Cockburn, The Nation (U.S.)

“EI is a democratic bombshell, a fascinating look between and behind the lines.” — The Web Review, ITV (UK)

“Making the pro-Palestinian cause more prominent with the media in recent years.” — Newsday (U.S.)

“Intended as a news source, the site has slowly been transforming into a work of art…” — The Daily Star (Lebanon)

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Web: http://electronicIntifada.net

Homepage of LASIK Surgery News

More doctors are entering the refractive surgery market every year, but the number of LASIK procedures performed in the U.S. has remained relatively flat since 2003. We believe that through our responsible consumer education efforts, LASIK Surgery News can allay the fears many people have about refractive surgery and increase the number of motivated, well-informed LASIK candidates.

“Research suggests that up to 80% of individuals interested in refractive surgery consult the Internet about LASIK before seeking the advice of an eye doctor,” says Gary Heiting, O.D., president and senior editor of LASIK Surgery News. “But currently, there’s no site online that is dedicated exclusively to LASIK and offers consumers current, authoritative, and easy-to-understand content about LASIK of sufficient depth to help them make a truly well-informed decision about having LASIK surgery.”

LASIK Surgery News changes that, according to the company. The new website reviews the latest news and clinical information about LASIK published in refractive surgery journals and other publications for eyecare professionals and reports on the topics of greatest interest to the public in consumer-friendly articles at LASIK Surgery News. To provide the most timely LASIK content available on the Web, LASIK Surgery News is updated several times a week.

The second mission of LASIK Surgery News is to grow the LASIK market and bring more patients to refractive surgeons. “More doctors are entering the refractive surgery market every year, but the number of LASIK procedures performed in the U.S. has remained relatively flat since 2003. We believe that through our responsible consumer education efforts, LASIK Surgery News can allay the fears many people have about refractive surgery and increase the number of motivated, well-informed LASIK candidates.”

LASIK Surgery News (LSN) offers the most extensive online directory of LASIK surgeons in North America, according to the company. In LSN’s Doctor Locator section, consumers in the U.S. and Canada can gain direct access to the websites of LASIK surgeons and laser vision centers in their area to help them decide where to go for a pre-operative consultation and LASIK surgery. “Our Doctor Locator currently contains information on over 900 laser vision centers in the U.S. and Canada, and we’re adding more listings every month,” says Dr. Heiting.

Basic listings in LSN’s Doctor Locator are free to doctors and include the laser center’s name and address. For an annual fee, surgeons and laser centers can purchase a premium listing that includes more information about their practice, including the name of all LASIK surgeons at the center, information about the type(s) of LASIK offered, contact phone numbers, interactive maps and driving directions to their location(s), and a direct link to their website.

“Many LASIK doctors and surgical centers have made a significant investment in creating an excellent website for their practice–they’re just not getting enough traffic to their site,” says Dr. Heiting. “A paid listing in LSN’s Doctor Locator is a very cost-effective way for LASIK doctors and surgical centers to improve their online marketing efforts and attract new patients.”

LASIK Surgery News also offers a free e-mail newsletter for consumers, primary eyecare providers and other news media who want to keep up-to-date on the latest news and research about LASIK and other forms of refractive surgery.

Officially launched on July 6, 2006, LASIK Surgery News is intended for consumers, LASIK surgeons, primary eyecare providers, health professionals and news media in the United States and Canada.

For more information about LASIK Surgery News, contact Dr. Heiting.

About Dr. Heiting

Gary Heiting

Contact

Gary Heiting, O.D.
LASIK Surgery News
640 Main Street N #9
Stillwater, MN 55082
Phone: (651) 329-4342
www.lasiksurgerynews.com

April 11th, 2006 – Organizers of the Made in Palestine exhibit announced today that the New York show will be extended until May 27th, after seeing 3,364 visitors pass through the Chelsea exhibit, in the heart of New York’s art world, during the first three weeks.

Exhibit curator James Harithas

Coming Events at The Bridge Gallery

Come celebrate the extension of Made in Palestine this Friday, April 14th, at an exciting evening of performance at The Bridge to raise money for the exhibition, hosted by Suheir Hammad (HBO’s Def Poetry Jam; “Zaatar Diva” author). Doors open at 6.00pm for art viewing, with readings and performances at 7.00pm by Maysoon Zayid (comedienne; NYAACF founder; MTV; 20/20), Ishle Park (HBO’s Def Poetry Jam; 2004 Poet Laureate of Queens), Kathy Engel (poet & activist; MADRE founder), Ehab Zahriyeh (Poetic Injustice), Nigel Parry (songwriter: “This Side of Paradise”; Electronic Intifada cofounder), and TBA. $15/$10 sliding scale. Donations accepted.

The Made in Palestine Closing Celebration will take place on Saturday, May 27th, from 6.00-9.00pm at the Bridge.

Coming Exhibit: Three Arab Painters in New York: Samia Halaby, Sumayyah Samaha and Athir Shayota

After the conclusion of the Made in Palestine exhibit, The Bridge is proud to present another exhibit: “Three Arab Painters in New York: Samia Halaby, Sumayyah Samaha and Athir Shayota.” Guest Curated by Maymanah Farhat, “Three Arab Painters in New York” will run from June 3rd to 24th, Tuesday-Saturday, 11.00am-6.00pm, with a reception on Tuesday, June 6th, 6.00-9.00pm.

GALLERY INFORMATION
The Bridge Gallery
521 West 26th Street, 3rd Floor
(between 10th and 11th Aves)
New York, NY
Tel: 646-584-9098

MADE IN PALESTINE EXHIBITION DATES
March 14th-May 27nd, 2006.
Open Tuesday to Saturday.
11.00am-6.00pm.
Admission free.
Guided tours by artist and exhibit consultant, Samia Halaby, on Saturdays in April at 4.00pm.

MADE IN PALESTINE CLOSING CELEBRATION
Saturday, May 27th, 2006.
6.00pm-9.00pm.

PUBLICITY CONTACT
Nigel Parry/nigelparry.net
646-808-0416

MEDIA RESOURCES
Previous press release, artists’ & curator/consultant bios, press clippings, essay extracts and high resolution images for print can be found at
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/2/prweb348579.htm
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/3/prweb356772.htm
http://prwebphotowire.com/releases/imid288.htm
http://madeinpalestine.net

[ends]

February 20, 2006—Made in Palestine is the first museum quality exhibition devoted to the contemporary art of Palestine to be held in the United States. It is a survey of work spanning three generations of Palestinian artists who live in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, parts of Israel, Syria, Jordan, and the United States. nigelparry.net is undertaking publicity for the exhibit.

“A rare opportunity to view contemporary art from Palestine… a longer look at daily life in Palestine than our edited nightly news snapshots ever reveal…. The quality is exceptional. What these artists add to our minds’ images of destruction and despair from this troubled region is an underlying sense of consciousness,strength and hope, both in themselves and their people.” – ArtvsHouston Gallery Review

The exhibition was curated by James Harithas during a month long stay in the Middle East, aided in his mission by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby. Made in Palestine premiered at The Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas and in 2005 traveled to San Francisco, CA, and Montpelier, VT.

“Another vision of Palestine and its people… Through a mix of painting, photography, sculpture, textiles, and video, the artists sow tales of love and loss. They speak of struggle and success. But probably most importantly, they offer hope for the future.” – The Christian Science Monitor

The artists have been gaining recognition in both regional and international arenas. They utilize a multiplicity of techniques, mediums, and aesthetic styles such as realism, abstraction, and conceptual art. They have been influenced by ancient and contemporary art of the Near East and Egypt as well as by such Western approaches to art as Arte Povera and Installation Art. The works range from monumental pieces that impact the visitor upon immediate entry to the gallery, to pieces of a more intimate nature that invite close attention.

Linking ancient and modern myth, Mustafa Al Hallaj uses fantastic and folkloric imagery in his 296-foot-long print, Self Portrait as God, the Devil and Man. Emily Jacir’s video installation Crossing Surda is a document of Jacir’s experiences, some banal, some harrowing, of crossing the militarized Surda checkpoint that separates Ramallah, where she lives, from Birzeit University, where she teaches. In I, Ishmael, Suleiman Mansour creates clay “emblems of decay” that are “dry, cracked and distorted, reminding us of dispersion, waste, pain and death.”

“A stunning exhibition…” – The Houston Chronicle

Palestinian artists, like their peers in Europe and the United States, are thoroughly contemporary, but with a significant difference – the Palestinian artist is deeply concerned with the historical fate of the Palestinian people and issues of life, death, freedom and justice.

“It’s hard to imagine peace if Palestinians can’t even be heard on their own terms.” – The New York Times

EXHIBITION DATES
March 14th-April 22nd, 2006.
Open Tuesday to Saturday.
12.00pm-6.00pm.
Admission free.

OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, March 16th, 2006.
6.00pm-9.00pm.

GALLERY INFORMATION
The Bridge Gallery
521 West 26th Street, 3rd Floor
(between 11th and 12th Aves)
New York, NY
Tel: 646-584-9098

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Zuhdi Al Adawi, Tyseer Barakat, Rana Bishara, Rajie Cook, Mervat Essa, Ashraf Fawakhry, Samia Halaby, John Halaka, Rula Halawani, Mustafa Al Hallaj, Jawad Ibrahim, Noel Jabbour, Emily Jacir, Suleiman Mansour, Abdel Rahmen Al Muzayen, Muhammad Rakouie, Nida Sinnokrot, Vera Tamari, and Mary Tuma.

PRESS & PUBLICITY CONTACT
Nigel Parry/nigelparry.net
Voicemail: 646-808-0416

STATION MUSEUM CONTACT
Rosalinda Gonzalez
Curator of Traveling Exhibitions
Tel: 713-529-6900

ONLINE INFORMATION
www.madeinpalestine.net

[ends]

“While there were often sporadic outbursts of violence, the place didn’t literally become a full-on warzone until 25 September 1996,” Parry recalls. “Benyamin Netanyahu approved the opening of a tourist tunnel that ran alongside the base of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, an explosive move that his security advisors warned against. One of the earliest resulting demonstrations — in Ramallah by Birzeit University students — was needlessly met with live ammunition…. Israeli troops were literally giving each other high fives as they shot people.”

Palestinian police eventually responded with gunfire of their own, and the resulting 5-day conflict claimed 15 Israeli and 88 Palestinian lives. “5 Palestinians were shot dead and 263 wounded by nightfall that [first] day in Ramallah. The walls and floors of Ramallah’s tiny hospital were covered in blood… The media coverage of what had transpired at the demonstration was so skewed that it became a moral imperative to challenge it, and the web was the most accessible publishing medium we had.”

During the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, Parry and his colleagues created the Electronic Intifada [El] website. “Israel reinvaded the entire West Bank in an operation it termed ‘Defensive Shield,” Parry told Cool’eh. “When Ramallah was put under curfew for two weeks, we launched a diaries section on the EI website that literally carried the only voices coming out of the town during the period. Mainstream media coverage of what we were doing followed, and El’s website saw 750,000 visitors that month alone.”

Parry and co.’s latest project, Electronic Iraq [eIraq], was founded in 2003, just before the war began. Cool’eh spoke with Parry about the realities of running a largely DIY wartime publication.

What are the ideological ingredients and logistical materials necessary to create a publication that offers reporting from the front lines of a war-torn country?

Conflict is dangerous in that it is a charged situation and you’re going to be perceived as taking sides by someone. The EI and eIraq websites are not affiliated with any governmental, political or religious groups, and are founded on the principle that the welfare of the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples is paramount. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a key consideration in our editorial policy.

While the dynamics of power in any conflict are usually very unbalanced, the truth of a situation is found in the experience of people on the street. The handshakes of leaders, the constitutions ratified by parliaments — all are meaningless unless it impacts the situation on the street. This is where the true measure of peace is found and it is a defensible place to focus reporting.

The projects were begun by a group of friends and colleagues that had been working together, on and off, for several years. Having solid relationships with those you’re working with is far more important than organizational structure, Logistically, the web is an extremely accessible and affordable medium, where you can secure professional-grade web hosting for just $200 a year.

Beyond that, it’s about access to computer equipment and your time. With a news website powered by a content management system, you can have multiple people working on the website from anywhere in the world that there’s an Internet connection and web browser. Digital cameras, digital video cameras and laptop computers are vital as you can’t drop film off for processing at Wallgreens or Rite Aid when there are tanks rolling down the streets!

On the ground, you definitely need people. While on one level this can mean sending people into the warzone, don’t forget that there are already people living there, working far non-governmental organizations and universities, who you can solicit to submit content for your site. Some people also regularly visit the region, and once you’re established you will find that people start offering to write for you when they visit. Word of mouth is very important.

How did you go about establishing sources on the ground in Iraq?

eIraq was launched because the EI team was frustrated that the existing site’s focus on Palestine did not give us much leeway to report on Iraq. So we rang our colleagues at Voices in the Wilderness [ViTW] who had been working in Iraq since the 1991 war, and who already had peace teams on the ground before the 2003 war, and said, “How would you guys like us to create a site like EI for Iraq, and work with you to get all that information out there?”

We knew we could handle general Iraq news reporting from existing news sources such as the United Nations, human rights organizations, and journalists’ rights organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists, and by soliciting articles from experts outside of Iraq. ViTW had its team infrastructure in place already, and therefore covered the one area we could not, reporting from inside the country.

EI and eIraq are run on a budget of $50,000 a year, less than the salary of a single foreign correspondent. While the core team is committed, we still all have full time jobs …. The majority of our budget for EI and eIraq comes from donations from individuals in the $25-$100 range. This is important, because it’s sustainable …. Finding time to fundraise when you’re already stretched to the limit with everything else is a challenge that there is no simple answer to.

What are some of the difficulties you face in running a publication about Iraq from the States?

Obviously the biggest difficulty is the physical distance, as communications are unreliable and expensive between the US and Iraq. During the war the US shut down telephone and Internet connections. Fortunately we had a satellite data modem that allowed us to independently access the Internet. Unfortunately, this cost around $25,000 in usage fees for the couple of months in which it was needed!

The situation during the war was extremely tense, with bombing clearly visible from the hotels where members of the Iraq Peace Teams were based. When even mainstream media journalists were finding themselves in the line of fire, the teams were operating in a high stress environment.

In the immediate aftermath of “Shock and Awe,” team members began visiting civilian neighborhoods before members of the commercial media. As the first to report civilian casualty stories from Iraqi hospitals and bombed neighborhoods, reporting fell below standards of clarity that the editorial team in the US wanted, but it was hard to resolve this. Telephone communication was so sporadic that you’d have to dial for several hours to reach Iraq. And the team on the ground was dealing with immense pressures. Think about it: You’ve just lived through seeing a city bombed. You knew from long before the first explosion that this was not a justified war of self-defense. And now you’re the first citizen from the aggressor country that stands face to face with the person who just lost their entire extended family when your military bombed a residential apartment building. It’s not the best frame of mind for anyone to calmly assess the facts of the matter.

Not to say that our reporting was flawed or inaccurate, but some of it was frustratingly incomplete. It’s just very hard to get definitive answers to questions in a warzone. When missiles are fired at a neighborhood, it’s not as if everyone is standing on their roof with a pen and paper taking notes. So you have to methodically weed through people’s assumptions and spend some time trying to find the one person who was on their roof hanging laundry and saw a plane approach and fire before they ran into their basement, so you can eliminate ground-based fire and know that — as there were no Iraqi planes in the air at that point — it was a US strike.

The teams did a fantastic job in the situation and there’s nothing I look back on in the site and wish we hadn’t published. eIraq’s reporting hit the nail on the head 95 percent of the time. Our main goal was to humanize the people we were at war with.

What was your strategy fur publicizing the site and drawing readers to it’s content?

When you have American peace activists reporting dally from Baghdad during “Shock and Awe,” it wasn’t hard to sell it. We saw coverage on US cable television and in key newspapers around the world. Months before the Abu Ghraib story broke, we were reporting stories of Iraqis who had been tortured in US detention, which clearly was, and remains, a widespread practice.

Unique coverage like this generates respect for the project and journalists and policymakers begin to add you to their bookmarks. Once one journalist starts writing about you, there’s a domino effect.

With e-mail announcements when new content is added, with other viral marketing tools such as ‘E-mail This Page’ and ‘Print This Page’ functions, and with the ability for other webmasters. to automatically syndicate news headlines from your site onto theirs, visitors publicize the site for you. News spreads fast in situations where the majority of reporters were holed up in hotels asking their waiters what was happening.

How do you gauge the success of Electronic Iraq?

We pulled off something no one else had done before and left behind a body of writing, from a different perspective than that dominating the mainstream media, during a nation-defining period in American and Iraqi history.

The first two months of the war we registered over one million visitors — unheard of for a new alternative media website. After the initial ground war, the Library of Congress and the British Library (the UK’s ‘Library of Congress’) both asked for permission to archive Electronic Iraq for researchers.

From before the war began, we were consistent on facts that we all now know to be true — that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and that the US administration was fabricating its case for war. Perhaps future historians will write tomes about how a multi-billion-dollar media industry utterly failed to even register something that 10 people with a few thousand dollars managed to figure out before a single shot was fired.

Do you have any advice for young people who are interested in developing publications that cover the realities of violent conflict?

The Internet is driven by content. If your content is unique, high quality, visually interesting, and regularly updated, you are already doing exactly what you should be doing.

Keeping it manageable is important…. It’s better to do one thing really well than overextend yourself.

The world isn’t black and white… just as there are a ton of Americans out there who wouldn’t want people in other countries to imagine that they are 100 percent supportive of the current US administration, there are a ton of Iraqis and Palestinians who feel exactly the same way when they read international media coverage about them, which portrays them as a homogenous mob.

If you can humanize a people in a time when your media is trapped reporting the government’s viewpoint as the dominant story — because they don’t want to bite the hand that grants them “access” — you’re well on the way to doing the right thing.

Nigel Parry lived in Ramallah, occupied Palestine, from 1994-1998 and is a cofounder of Electronic Iraq and the Electronic Intifada, alternative news websites that won the ADC’s Voices of Peace award in 2003. He lives in New York City with his dog, Roo, and works as a freelance web designer through his business, nigelparry.net

Related Links

Cooleh Magazine

]]> http://nigelparry.net/archives/254/feed 0 http://nigelparry.net/archives/247 http://nigelparry.net/archives/247#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2004 02:48:38 +0000 Nigel Parry http://nigelparry.net/consulting/?p=247 The Electronic Intifada (EI) website, has become the place to go on the internet to find out what’s really happening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A quarter of a million people visit the site a month. In January 2004, the EI team revamped the website and launced Version 3.0. Rami El-Amine from Left Turn spoke to Nigel Parry, one of the founders and designers of the Electronic Intifada, about the new site and its incredible success over the past three years.

Left Turn: Since readers of Left Turn may not be familiar with Electronic Intifada (EI), could you give us a quick backgrounder on when, why and how EI got started.

Nigel Parry: The Electronic Intifada (EI) is a not-for-profit, independent publication committed to comprehensive public education on the question of Palestine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the economic, political, legal, and human dimensions of Israel’s 37-year occupation of Palestinian territories. EI provides a needed supplement to mainstream commercial media representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The four founders — Ali Abunimah, Laurie King-Irani, Arjan El Fassed, and myself — represent a mix of internationals and Palestinians who have been working on the Palestinian question for many years. We came together to form EI in part out of frustration with infighting in existing activist initiatives, in part due to the impetus generated by the Second Intifada, and because we felt that the most needed contribution to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a credible, mainstream news source offering a window into the Palestinian experience of life under occupation.

The Electronic Intifada’s website receives around one quarter of a million visitors (not “hits”) each month. During periods of increased conflict, the number of visitors can dramatically increase. During Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in March/April 2002, EI’s website saw over 600,000 visits in the period of one month.

EI has received favorable reviews in respected publications that include the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Nation, Utne Reader, and the Jerusalem Post. EI’s founders are regularly contacted by the mainstream electronic media, such as the BBC, CBC, CNN and dozens of radio stations around the world, to provide commentary and analysis on events in the Middle East.

 

LT: You’ve just launched Version 3.0 of the site. What are some of the main changes you’ve made to the site and what prompted them?

NP: Ken Harper and myself – the design team — were attempting to achieve two main goals. One was to improve and finalize the general navigation of the site, the other to enhance the visual design of the site.

We were inspired in part by online news websites such as MSNBC.com and CBC.ca which, despite the usual reporting issues common to the North American media, offer a rich variety of articles, useful multimedia content, and strong visual images.

A key addition was the BY TOPIC directory, which offers a browsable interface to the content on EI’s site and beyond. We also made more prominent our call for submissions of content, and expanded our About EI section to offer financial reports and detailed team bios, as a way of increasing transparency.

 

LT: I’ve noticed that over the years the amount of reports from the frontlines and their prominance on the site has increased. Also, a lot of the reports seem to come from members of the International Solidarity Movement. How did this relationship with the ISM develop?

NP: We have always appreciated the work of ISM. Rachel Corrie’s death impacted us deeply, as it signalled the end of an era where the presence of internationals would work to minimise Israeli violence against Palestinians. Having lived in Palestine myself for 4 years, I understood exactly the kind of situation she found herself in and the callousness of the Israeli military present was chilling.

While it is nothing new for people to die in the conflict the killing of an international in cold blood in front of eyewitnesses, with no help offered from the bulldozer crew after Rachel was crushed, was a sign that Israel’s sense of impunity had reached a new level that heralded increased violence towards Palestinians and internationals.

EI began publishing the breaking story on the same day Rachel was killed, and was very quick to offer annotated images of the event.

That article remains the most read page on EI almost a year later.

 

LT: The activism section is also something that has grown considerably over the years. Can you comment on why that is and how it has evolved?

NP: There is more activism than ever before on Palestine. The ground swell reminds me of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the US in the late 1980s. We want groups to submit well-written reports on actions they take around the world, with images, as we believe that activists in other countries will be inspired by the many excellent and creative initiatives that people are working on.

QUIT’s “colonization” of Starbucks was one such event we reported that had a lighter side. On the other end of the scale, New York activist groups stopped traffic on Fifth Avenue with some Rachel Corrie-inspired street theater that was very to the point, with props that included bulldozer blades and blood. Many people are trying different things to draw people into a deeper understanding of the conflict, our responsibility for it, and ways we can work to end it.

 

LT: How much impact do you feel EI has had on the corporate media’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Do you feel they’re any more “objective” in their coverage?

NP: We are often contacted by the commercial media for background information, contacts on the ground, and for interviews. For example, we set up CNN with one of the Palestinians inside the Church of the Nativity during the siege.

Newsday credited us and Palestine Media Watch “with making the pro-Palestinian cause more prominent with the media in recent years through letters to editors, op-ed pieces and appearances on talk shows. ”

Mostly, the problems in coverage seem to stem from the management level of media organisations, who are subjected to a ceaseless barrage of complaints from the Israeli side which appears to be primarily concerned that the organisations report on Israeli repression without justifying it for them.

Often the journalists are not the problem, even in organisations such as CNN which is widely considered to have the worst TV coverage of the conflict. CNN journalists do file hard hitting stories that challenge Israeli practices on the ground, but they either are edited, spiked or broadcast only on CNN International, which offers much better coverage than the awful CNN domestic that most Americans receive. During Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in March/April 2002, one 60 Minutes producer told me that all three of the stories his team worked on during 2 months there were never going to see the light of day.

While there are still endemic problems with media coverage, mostly in North America, we feel that print media coverage has improved in some ways, although one still regularly witnesses serious distortions such as the widespread description of a two-month period at the end of 2003, during which 117 Palestinians were killed, as “relative calm”. What the journalist meant was that few Israelis had died during the period.

In general, TV news coverage remains miserable, couching every Israeli attack on a Palestinian population area as “retaliation”, briefly mentioning killings of Palestinians while offering extensive, borderline pornographic, coverage of the aftermath of suicide bombs.

 

LT: Clearly there’s been a sea change in opinion and activism around Palestinian rights around the world but particularly here in the US. What factors do you feel helped bring about this change? How much of a role, if any, has the internet played in bringing about that change?

NP: I think the Intifada, the commercial media, and the Internet are the main facilitators for this trend. People first became interested in the issue because the Intifada resulted in an intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which meant that they see it on TV every night.

Since 9/11 in America, many people are actively seeking alternative news sources. It has become evident that the US government intentionally misled us about Iraq’s WMDs — and the media never challenged these lies until the damage had been done. Instead of any genuine investigative journalism, all TV channels pumped out an uncritical and relentless pro-war message. As a result, 14,000 Iraqis and 700 Americans are now dead. Media encouragement for war should be considered a crime against international law.

 

LT: What are some of the future goals of the EI Team?

NP: Primarily, now that the website structure is more stabilised, we want 2004 to be EI’s Year of Content. We want good writers to contribute to EI regularly, and increase both the amount and scope of our coverage in all areas of the site.

In financial terms, EI desperately needs to be able to afford to pay people to maintain the website, so that we have a reliable content flow. The current volume of content and process of adding it sometimes overwhelms the current team members, who put together and maintain the site on a budget of just $50,000, less than the salary of a single foreign correspondent. Were we able to double our budget, we would be in a much better position to consolidate and move on.

 

LT: What needs to be done to bring about a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what role can EI play in making that a reality?

NP: Apartheid ended in South Africa when citizens of Western nations made any support for South Africa politically disadvantageous for politicians.

This didn’t come about because people were sending charitable donations to Black South African hospitals and schools, nor did it come about because people were going to South Africa to see for themselves (the Anti-Apartheid Movement discouraged this for boycott reasons). It happened when the cause became a mainstream concern, when it was always being discussed in the news, when popular musicians sang songs about South Africa and held highly visible benefit concerts broadcast to 1 billion people around the world — one fifth of the earth’s population at the time.

The change happened because on every high street in the UK where I was living at the time, you’d walk past activists on Saturday afternoon who were handing out leaflets about the situation, or normal people like you and I who were simply wearing FREE MANDELA T-Shirts. The campaign was in front of you all the time, its goals were simple and understandable, and when you started reading more about the issue it became patently obvious — as in the case of Palestine — that whatever justifications the side with power wanted to make, the issue was a black and white case of racist-inspired injustice.

Palestinians need to start seriously funding information sources like EI so that we can increase our outreach and help speed this process. While giving to hospitals and schools on the ground is important, it is reactive rather than proactive. Stemming the bleeding is one thing, but educating the North American public about life on the ground for Palestinians will motivate them to call on their leaders to halt the bloodshed for once and all. That’s the only way any of this will change for the better.

The Israelis certainly aren’t making the same mistake. Public relations and information production for them is a high priority. Look how much they get away with as a result.

EI will continue to inform people about the situation on the ground so that they have access to understanding the actual cost of the conflict for normal people, and have the tools to get past the demonisation that forms much of the media’s Palestinian repertoire.

In terms of a just solution, the occupation needs to end immediately, and the armed paramilitary settlers must vacate Palestinian land. Settling an American or Russian-born armed religious zealot on a poor Palestinian farmer’s land is a criminal act. There should be no negotiation about crimes. Without a doubt, these two steps would end the ongoing violence immediately.

Then, Palestinian refugees should be permitted to have permanent residency in a country of their choice, whether in the US, Europe, their old land in 1948 Israel, or a Palestinian state. Frankly, after ignoring them for 50 years, the international community owes the refugees the right to live out the rest of their precious days on earth anywhere they damned well please. If a few Israelis need to give back the keys of their homes to the original Palestinian owners and Israel needs to resettle some of its citizens in alternative accommodation to make that happen, well, worse things already happened to the Palestinians to get us where we are. It’s time for some accountability and justice.

If the road leads to a single state in Israel/Palestine that many seem to think is a good solution to the conflict — which would mean the end of the Zionist dream of an ethnically homogenous Jewish state — so be it. After the horrors of the last 100 years, humanity should run in the opposite direction from any person or group or nation that suggests creating any system that discriminates against anyone based on race or religion.

The American public doesn’t seem to grasp that there is a road less traveled where we can deal with international conflicts in a way that preserves international law rather than undermines it. In today’s America, for partisan ideological reasons supported by a minority of American citizens, such common sense considerations seem secondary to the all-important charge into an era of endless war.

]]> http://nigelparry.net/archives/247/feed 0 http://nigelparry.net/archives/237 http://nigelparry.net/archives/237#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2003 02:02:10 +0000 Nigel Parry http://nigelparry.net/consulting/?p=237

Nigel Parry and Ali Abunimah accept the ADC's "Voices of Peace" award

Two Electronic Intifada co-founders, Ali Abunimah and Nigel Parry, were at the 20th National Convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee—think “NAACP for Arabs”—in Washington DC on 14 June 2003 to accept the ADC’s Voices of Peace Award on behalf of the founders of EI and sister site Electronic Iraq. The award was presented to EI and eIraq “in recognition of its commitment to bringing the concerns, voices, and experiences of the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples to audiences the world over via the Internet.”

Acceptance Speech

When we look back at Electronic Intifada and Electronic Iraq and how these have fitted into our lives as individual activists, they are actually part of a continuum. Electronic Intifada was founded in 2001 and Electronic Iraq in 2003 but the reality is that we’ve been going for many years before that, from the first Birzeit University website on which work began in 1995.

My “Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” photo diary chronicled the Ramallah redeployment. During the September 1996 Clashes, myself together with a group of Birzeit staff and students published “On the ground in Ramallah: Reports from a town become battlefield” — the first alternative news website published from within a war zone.

In 1999, Ali launched “Ali Abunimah’s Bitter Pill” to uncover media myths. The following years saw successful e-mail campaigns that forced Burger King and Kappa-Benneton to consider their ties with Israeli settlements that Arjan El Fassed worked hard on. And Laurie King-Irani’s work with the lawyers bringing the case against Ariel Sharon, Amos Yaron and other Israelis and Lebanese responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres has resulted in the opening of investigations leading to possible convictions in Belgium.

In 2000, when the Second Intifada broke out, we worked with Addameer to build the September 2000 Clashes website, which chronicled in great detail the first 60 days of the Intifada from a Palestinian perspective. And in 2001 we founded the Electronic Intifada, Palestine’s weapon of mass instruction, which offered the only reports from residents of Ramallah during Israel’s Orwellian-titled “Operation Defensive Shield”. In 2003 Electronic Iraq represented an alternative news moon shot, with daily reports from peace activists in Baghdad before, during, and after the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign.

We’ve achieved a lot and have received many accolades. The Nation’s Alexander Cohen described us as “trusted”. The Financial Times called us “spectacular”. ITV’s “The Web Review” called us “a democratic bombshell” and gave us “10 out of 10″. Newsday credited us with “making the Palestinian cause more prominent” and even the Jerusalem Post dubbed us “the Palestinian CNN”.

These things aren’t enough. “Enough” is an important part of the equation here. For almost ten years now, we’ve been producing alternative news websites and they’ve had an impact. Electronic Iraq and Electronic Intifada — depending on how ‘hot’ the situation is on the ground — together receive between 300,000 and one million unique visitors a month. But these are shoestring operations. And my question to all of us here is: What would we actually be able to do if we actually had the resources?

]]> http://nigelparry.net/archives/237/feed 0 http://nigelparry.net/archives/233 http://nigelparry.net/archives/233#comments Thu, 27 Feb 2003 01:58:17 +0000 Nigel Parry http://nigelparry.net/consulting/?p=233 According to Nua, a leading Internet trends and statistics research group, the worldwide online population grew from 119 million to 580 million from mid-1998 to early-2003. This represents an astounding increase of 461 million Internet users in just five years.[1] The enormous population growth of this highly cost-effective publishing medium is a great boon to organizations with limited resources desiring to reach the largest possible audience.

Online news overview

News is one of the main objectives of Internet users and one of the fastest growing content markets. Accessing news content is Internet users’ second favorite online activity after email, according to a 2000 survey from Zatso, Inc and the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF).[2]

In the first half of 2002, major newspaper websites in seven of the ten largest US markets saw visitor growth at a rate faster than the market’s total Internet population growth. During this period, the New York Daily News saw a 23 percent growth in visits, while unique Internet users for the total New York market area rose by just three percent. Our experience with the Electronic Intifada echoes these trends. During 2002, site traffic grew from a rate of around 80,000 visits a month to one quarter of a million.

A 2002 survey found that the Internet is the third source of news for British citizens, behind television and radio. Newspapers and magazines have dropped to fourth and fifth places respectively. According to the survey, individuals between 16-34 years of age spend 15 times longer on the Net during an average week than they do reading a newspaper.[3]

In early 2002, the Online News Association published a US study indicating that respondents consider online news as credible as news they obtain from other, more traditional news sources. Ironically, online newsreaders were “more likely to have a firm opinion about the credibility of traditional media while remaining far more neutral about online news sources,”[4] perhaps highlighting a trend toward more critical and judicious reading of the mainstream press.

Popularity of alternative sources

“Alternative” or “supplementary” news websites are increasing in popularity, particularly in the current situation of global political tensions. The Pew Internet Project noted in January 2003 that “specialized political and issue-oriented sites are becoming more popular. Thirty percent of online campaign news consumers reported that they went to such sites most often, compared with just 19% in 2000.”[5]

The reach of online media has penetrated key areas of society, including crucial target audiences for re-dissemination such as the media and young people, audiences frequently described as having a “multiplier effect.”

Almost 75 percent of all US journalists used the Internet daily in 2000, representing a substantial increase from 48 percent in 1999.[6] More than one-third of reporters said the Internet is the first place they go to gather research, according to a 2000 survey sponsored by public relations agency Burson-Marsteller.[7] A 2002 study from the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI), reached similar conclusions, finding that more than 50 percent of political journalists in the US read political coverage online.[8]

The Internet is an effective and efficient way to reach young people. An Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) study in Autumn 2002 found that pressure groups are more likely to engage young people in political activity through the Internet than through more traditional methods. Just 10 percent of Internet users were found to delete messages forwarded by acquaintances, compared to 29 percent who delete unsolicited political emails.[9]

Middle East-related websites

The Guardian newspaper reported in October 2001 that traffic from the UK to Middle East news websites surged as Internet users sought out alternative news sources in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy.[10]

Harris Interactive reported that the number of US Internet users who say the Internet is their primary news source has more than doubled since those events. The percentage of people using the Internet as one of their information sources, if not their primary source, jumped from 64% to 80% in the two weeks following the attacks, overtaking radio (72%) and second only to television, with 98%.

Sixty three percent said they went online because they could obtain information at times that suited them, 43 percent because more detailed news could be found online, 42 percent because more up-to-date information was available online, and 42 percent because they could access news while at work.[11] Similar trends were evident in site visits to the Electronic Intifada during the same period.

Conclusion

This brief overview of Internet users’ approach to news gathering on the Net demonstrates that online news publishing is a cost-effective, high growth industry; a proven way of reaching out to key groups (including those who contribute content to traditional media) and the younger generation who will shape the future; and an excellent venue for publishing political viewpoints that are excluded, marginalized, or minimized in the mainstream and traditional media. The Electronic Intifada is well placed to maximise its impact on public understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Endnotes

[1] www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/
[2] “Internet Users Like Choosing News”, Nua, 18 May 2000.
www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905355787
[3] “The Net is the third source of news for UK users”, Nua, 29 July 2002.
www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905358216
[4] www.journalists.org/Programs/ona_credibilitystudy2001report.pdf
[5] “The Internet and Campaign 2002″, Pew Internet Project, 5 January 2003.
www.pewinternet.org/releases/release.asp?id=58
[6] “Journalists Scour the Net for Story Ideas”, Nua, 13 March 2000.
www.nua.ie/ surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905355652
[7] “Just the Online Facts, Ma’am”, by Genia Jones, The Industry Standard, 19 December 2000.
www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,20942,00.html
[8] “American political journalists rely on Net”, Nua, 17 October 2002.
www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905358465
[9] “Politicians must exploit Internet to win ‘apathetic’ young voters – study”, ESRC, 9 September 2002.
www.esrc.ac.uk/esrccontent/news/september02-3.asp
[10] “Arab websites see traffic soar”, by Owen Gibson, Guardian, 9 October 2001.
media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,565677,00.html
[11] “Harris Interactive Survey Shows Internet’s Growth as Primary Source of News and Information in Weeks Following September 11 Attacks”, Harris Interactive, 5 October 2001.
www.harrisinteractive.com/news/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID= 371

This article was first published on The Electronic Intifada website. Nigel Parry is one of the four founders of the Electronic Intifada, and has worked as an Internet consultant and web designer since 1995, when work began on the original Birzeit University website. In September 1996, Nigel and a team of Birzeit staff and students published the first alternative news website from inside a war zone. In August 1997, he spoke at the United Nations on the development of the Palestinian Internet. Today he coordinates supplementary news projects The Electronic Intifada and Electronic Iraq and works as a commercial web designer. His business website can be found at http://nigelparry.net.

Article cited in Millennial Manifesto by Scott Beale and Abeer Abdalla.

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