This is heartbreaking. My thoughts are with David’s friends and family, and with the Ugandan GLBT community as a whole.

Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato was found murdered yesterday, just weeks after winning a court case against a local newspaper that had called for Ugandans to “hang” homosexuals.

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Uganda has been in the news for gay rights issues since October 2009, when Member of Parliament David Bahati tabled a bill that would provide for life imprisonment or the death penalty for not only homosexuals but also anyone found to be supporting or promoting gay rights.

The proposed bill has stirred up considerable anti-gay sentiments in Uganda, including the publication by local newspaper Rolling Stone [no relation to Rolling Stone Magazine] of a list of 100 suspected homosexuals and their addresses. Kato was on the list, and his face was on the paper’s front page.

Read the full post on Global Voices Online »

Posted in global voices, human rights, LGBT, uganda, ugandan blogosphere, ugandan media | 2 Comments

After I published an article for the Committee to Protect Journalists on citizen journalism during the Kampala riots, Shevonne Hunt of Australian radio show The Fourth Estate contacted me to talk about the role Twitter and blogs played in the crisis.

Solomon King (the force behind Ugandan blog aggregator Blogspirit and one of the most prolific tweeters during the riots) and I are featured in the show’s most recent podcast. You can access it at The Fourth Estate (scroll down to the bottom, click “Show Episodes,” and choose the episode from September 25).

As Solomon says, hope I did all of you justice!

Posted in conflict, press freedom, social media, uganda, ugandan blogosphere, ugandan media | 1 Comment

The research I did in Uganda in January has just been published.

There Will be Ink: A study of journalism training and the extractive industries in Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda (PDF) is the product of research I conducted with five other students from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in the spring of 2009.

We surveyed media coverage of the extractive sector and interviewed African journalists who had training in business and economic reporting. Our goal was to identify the training practices that are most helpful in teaching journalists how to encourage government transparency in the extractive industries through their reporting.

The journalists surveyed said that journalism training had improved their coverage of the extractives, but we concluded that there are other challenges in the African media landscape that are not addressed by training. These include low salaries, lack of resources, pressure from government and advertisers and the lack of freedom of information laws. The report includes recommendations for organizations planning journalism training activities in countries with extractive sectors.

Posted in africa, media, transparency, ugandan media | 2 Comments