nothing to see here except this kitten, please move along
Hats off to everyone involved in Brighton-lite thus far…. But there are some new lunatics in charge of the asylum and you’ll be hearing from us soon… meanwhile here is a picture of a kitten…
‘Kitten’ appears courtesy of http://www.freeanimalswallpapers.com/
By Poppy Bragg
Photo by Stuart Isett - isett.com
The 2011 Brighton Festival is taking inspiration from its guest director, Burmese Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, by celebrating liberty and freedom of expression.
Suu Kyi is the third person to hold this position, following artist Anish Kapoor in 2009 and musician/producer Brian Eno in 2010.
But unlike her predecessors she will not be able to attend the event, due to fears that if she leaves Burma she will be prevented from returning by the military junta that rules the country.
Suu Kyi said in a recorded video message that the festival was: “A time for festivity, for diversity, for creativity, for expression, for freedom of expression.
“We look to you, to use your freedom of expression to let the world know what it is like in our country, what it is like to not be able to say what you want to say.”
By Claire Smyth
The newspaper industry is dying because the internet is stealing all its readers. This was the message to Brighton journalism students who attended a talk earlier this month by the Guardian newspaper reporter who helped to break many of the recent Wikileaks cables.
Award-winning investigative journalist, and author of Flat Earth News, Nick Davies spoke to a group of journalism students at City College Brighton and Hove on March 14 (Mon).
He described his first meeting with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a Brussels café where they negotiated the handing over of secret documents on the war in Afghanistan which the Guardian newspaper published last year.
Nick Davies before his talk to City College Brighton and Hove students
Mr Davies said he chanced upon the discovery after reading a story about the arrest of Bradley Manning – a whistleblower who passed on classified information to Assange.
He said: “Most of the time I find stories by using my imagination, looking at something and wondering if anything else is there.
“You’re constantly using your imagination to guess what might be there. You have to use your brain like a muscle.”
While also working on the News of the World phone-hacking revelations, Davies was secretly investigating the documents handed over by Assange – who gave him access to secret files by underlining letters on a beer mat to create a password.
Davies added: “We had to lie to friends and family. We couldn’t tell anyone. We had our own room in the Guardian offices, complete with a cover story of why we were there.”
Davies’s book, Flat Earth News, was published in 2008 and describes the pressures on journalists today which often results in the ‘churnalism’ of press releases.
Davies told the students: “Because we are short of resources lots of news desks and reporters churn out unchecked stories.
“You’re training to get into an industry that is clearly dying. But it is happening at the same time as the journalism itself is really exciting.”
City College Brighton and Hove journalism student Georgie Newman, 23, from Guildford, said: “His accounts of the clandestine meetings with Assange were really exciting. Who knew journalism could be so fun?”
