by Drew and Arthur

On March 8, International Women’s Day, a group of Russian feminist activists protested outside the Kremlin.

Their banner said, “200 years men in power, out with them!”
Ekaterina Nenasheva’s post accompanying the video reads:

“Moscow and St. Petersburg feminists, #CapturedKremlin, congratulate you on March 8
UPD: Tishchenko, Orlova and a photographer from Nova already in the Police Station – China Town
UPD: at 14:20 – released all detainees”

Meanwhile, Putin was congratulating the staff at the new perinatal centre in Bryansk. After all, the history of International Women’s day is rooted in Russia.

The President toured the new perinatal centre in Bryansk and congratulated the staff on International Women’s Day https://t.co/3I9WaI5Qwg pic.twitter.com/hJFdMyosIy

— President of Russia (@KremlinRussia_E) March 8, 2017

The feminists gathered in a prominent location, Alexander Garden, right at the edge of the Kremlin’s walls:

News of the demonstration spread quickly on social media, with over 43k people watching Nenasheva’s video.

Some declared the protesters heroines.

My #InternationalWomensDay heroines: The women who scale the Kremlin's wall to call for an unlikely scenario: a Russian woman president. https://t.co/UPdrE40caJ

— Yuliya Komska (@ykomska) March 8, 2017

One person wrote on Facebook in Russian: “You are still bathing in a bath with champagne, and your revolutionary friends have already taken the Kremlin.”

Not all coverage of the demonstration was positive, though.

A photo of protesters appearing to have breached the Kremlin walls turned out to be Photoshopped.

The fake photo was quickly denounced, even by the organizers, in a Facebook post that has since been deleted (but was reported on by Buzzfeed).

In that deleted post, Ekaterina Nenasheva says:

“I’m hurting right now for Russian art activism and the feminist collective, because the picture of the Arsenal tower really did turn out to be photoshop. Only a few participants knew about it, and now I know too.
I deeply respect all participants of the protest and don’t want to devalue their actions. All the other photos and videos are real. Thank you, girls!
But I also consider it absolutely unprofessional and unacceptable to have such an approach to work, in any case, the use of photoshop was not part of the original concept.”

Others used it as an opportunity to discuss the much talked about “fake news”.

Fighting fire with Fire and fake news with fake news? Feminist photoshop takes on the Kremlin #IWD2017 https://t.co/9D9ajkxryB

— Eilish Hart (@EilishHart) March 9, 2017

This story uses fold to discuss the 2014 Rolling Stones account of sexual assault on the University of Virginia campus. It discusses the long term social impact of the story on the UVA community as well as the effect the story had on a UVA alumna’s perception of media credibility. A Question of Trust

Photo courtesy of the Nieman Foundation 

After spending much of the past decade reporting on politics and science in his home state of North Carolina, Tyler Dukes became concerned about a glaring gap in the skill sets being taught to the next generation of reporters in journalism schools. As an investigative reporter on the state politics team for the local television station WRAL in Raleigh, Dukes has focused on using data and public records to uncover and tell stories of the problems plaguing mental health care in state prisons and the implementation of protection orders for victims of domestic violence. Yet in his experience teaching at UNC-Chapel Hill’s journalism school and as a researcher at Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab, he saw that data journalism was being addressed in only the most superficial ways, if at all.

“Very few courses are offered,” Dukes said in an interview, speaking of journalism schools across the country, “and when they are, they are far outstripped by courses like how to make pretty graphs and how to do data visualization.  It is not data analysis first. It is not using data as  a source first.  It is not acquiring data through public records and things like that. So it skips this really important step, which is data literacy.”

Hoping to address this problem, Dukes and his wife moved to Cambridge in the fall where Dukes would spend an academic year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University studying best practices for college journalism programs and newsrooms looking to democratize data-driven reporting for underserved communities. Now more than half way through his fellowship, Dukes acknowledges he is far from discovering a solution to those challenges. Much of the fall semester was spent taking advantage of Harvard’s offerings to address gaps in his own knowledge in areas like statistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.  These classes, he said, helped to both demystify certain concepts but also offer pedagogical lessons on how to teach things like statistics from a practical, applied perspective to policy makers or journalists who may have limited math backgrounds.

In his remaining months in Cambridge, Dukes plans to continue conversations he began in the fall with students and reporters about how best to move ahead with his idea of creating an extracurricular independent study resource about the various facets of data journalism. He says he envisions some kind of platform, perhaps recorded Google hangouts or Skype calls with experts, that students who do not feel served by their journalism schools could easily access.  While many similar online modules and resources for journalists exist in an ad hoc fashion, he says that dedicated organizations have had difficulties incorporating these models into universities and colleges.

“If we are pretending we are equipping them to be journalists in modern times they have to have basic data literacy,” Dukes said. “And if journalism school aren’t going to do it, someone is going to have to force their hand.”

In the meantime, Dukes and his fellow Niemans are also using their time in Cambridge to reflect on the deeper questions about their role in the journalism ecosystem that have emerged in the politically volatile past few months. He admits he is starting to feel the pull to return back to his newsroom which, despite widespread consternation about the future of local news, is still relatively robust.  While the overall economic climate for journalism is shaky and shifting quickly, Dukes thinks people are too quick to generalize about an industry that is hardly monolithic and varies widely based on platform and location. Though increased coverage and competition from other outlets would be welcome, Dukes has the luxury of returning to a healthy newsroom in a fairly well covered media market that is continuing to aggressively report on post-election dynamics in his absence.

Though he concedes a twinge of regret at not being in the thick of things, he says that “the impact of elections are felt for years…the story is not going away.” And at a moment in which the role of the press in covering politics is being hotly debated, there is a certain “perspective that comes from being forced not to do your job for several months. Hopefully it is going to make our work that much better when we get back.”

In the spirit of doing the assignment in a medium outside my wheelhouse, I attempted to create a multimedia storytelling account of a lecture I attended at the MFA. The end result is ok though since I was confined to the free version of the platform Atavist I had to make due without most of the bells and whistles and stick to relatively basic functions. I wonder if ultimately the final product is anything more than a glorified powerpoint, which leads me to question whether traditional journalistic reportage is sometimes still the best option. The time constraint was also an issue as I sought to master this new platform. A major error is that I had hoped to upload audio of a bilingual portion of the event but I had recorded in m4a and  atavist only accepted mp3 format and I didn’t have time to do a conversion. Thus for the time-being the audio is a placeholder of birds chirping…

You can see my story here

This is our 4h challenge, with Rebecca.

A one-time podcast about how popular Oscars are with MIT students. The podcast can be found on SoundCloud.

This podcast was created by Dijana, Maddie, Mika & Sruthi. It took just under 4 hours to discuss the idea, interview students, record and publish the podcast. (Monday 11:30 am – 3:15 pm)

Some behind the scenes pictures for entertainment purposes:

Discussing the idea ->

Interviewing students ->

Editing those audio recordings ->

Writing the podcast script ->

..And the reporters rehearse for podcast recording in our makeshift audio room (in between doors at the student center entrance) ->