One of J’s friends, Alex, trained as a journalist and now does a lot of freelance work using new media. I’ve never met him myself but thanks to J, and Alex’s website, I know something of what he is up to and am impressed at his initiative and independence. He had a big break back in the spring when he created a website to report the G20 protest in real time – video footage and Tweets from the demonstration were beamed back to the site as soon as they had been recorded. The site got 80,000 hits and some of its footage was picked up by the BBC.
Today Alex and four other journalists are launching The Berlin Project, which is based on a similar ethos to the G20 Live site. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November, the team will be publishing seven days of coverage, using techniques which they claim are “markedly different from standard TV, radio, and print journalism”. That means using smartphones to push content straight on to the project’s website from around the city.
There’s already content up about the iconic Ampelmann, the Turkish community and of course the wall, so take a look at www.theberlinproject.com
