I’m reading stories about the closing of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver with a great deal of sadness. I wasn’t a reader of the newspaper, and I have no personal connection to Colorado, but I had the chance to meet John Temple, the paper’s long-time editor and publisher, a few weeks ago at a talk I gave at the University of Denver.

I was moved that Temple took time to attend an event celebrating free speech while his paper was going through a period of such uncertainty, and grateful that he took the time to engage my talk in a column in his paper. That column, titled “Time to play offense, not defense” gave me the sense that the Rocky Mountain News went down fighting, with Temple looking towards future scenarios for newspapers up to the moment the newspaper closed its doors.

Denver has been a two newspaper town for many years – the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News have engaged in a rivalry for over a hundred years. In one of his last columns, Temple explains that this rivalry kept circulation high, but subscription revenue low, and artificially depressed advertising rates. Since 2000, the papers have combined their operations – though not their newsrooms – under a joint operating agreement. With the JOA in place, the papers tried to raise rates, with some success, but Temple argues that advertising rates are still far below what they are in similarly sized markets.

The Rocky Mountain News isn’t the only newspaper facing closure. The Washington Post, writing about the shuttering of the Rocky notes, “Hearst threatened this week to close the San Francisco Chronicle unless major budget cuts are imposed or a buyer is found, and is also prepared to close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if it cannot be sold. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News filed for bankruptcy protection this week, joining Chicago’s Tribune Co. and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in Chapter 11 status.”

None of these papers are likely to find buyers – there are too many newspapers on the market, and too much uncertainty about business models to support newspapers. Papers in large markets, like Denver, that don’t have a national profile (like the New York Times or the Washington Post) seem to have the most trouble surviving – they’ve got high newsroom costs, and people are hard at work creating alternative advertising outlets to serve the large markets. In comparison, smaller newspapers may have an easier time – they’re more likely to have a defensible local monopoly for community advertising, and they’ve got lower newsroom and production costs.

There’s a sad irony for me in writing about the Rocky Mountain News’s demise. I wrote, a few weeks back, about the economics of my local newspaper, the Berkshire Eagle. The piece sparked a great deal of conversation, both locally and around the web, and I’ve gotten feedback that’s helped me understand the economics of my local paper better. I believe that my local paper is probably profitable, due to very high ad rates which may make sense because the paper has an effective local monopoly. The profitability of the paper helps it sustain other papers in its chain, MediaNews group. The central property of MediaNews Group is the Denver Post, which will be taking over the Rocky Mountain News’s subscribers. So perhaps the Rocky’s demise will help shore up the finances of the parent company of my local paper – maybe they’ll finally buy new computers for my friends who produce the Eagle on ten-year old Macs.

Or maybe what happened to the Rocky is simply a herald for the fans of other storied newspapers around the world. It’s not hard to imagine that a rough economy, a transitioning advertising market and the analog to digital shift will leave other newspapers forced to quickly find a white knight or to shut their doors.

Reading Temple’s columns the past few days, I was pleased to see that he found some consolation in the fact that the Rocky got to report on its own demise, that they were given “the chance to play the music at your own funeral”.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Here’s some of that funeral music, a video report on the last edition of the Rocky Mountain News. Rest in peace, Rocky, and good luck to everyone else figuring out how to avoid this fate.

• FacebookOrganizing.com
  Campaign to make Facebook a more effective platform for organizers. Targets the 5,000 member limit for sending emails to members of a group
  (tags: facebook activism community blogs campaigns)

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to Яolcats, a site that promises “English Translations of Eastern Bloc Lolcats”. One of my astute readers pointed out that, while the “translations” are hilarious, they bear no resemblance to the actual Russian text. For example:

actually translates as “If you’ve invited a girl to dance and she has agreed…don’t be too happy. You will still have to dance first.”

translates as “Age changes the style of a man; As the years go by, it gets harder to purr…and wrinkles – traces of the smiles of bye gone days – crease your face.”

I linked to the Яolcats site because I was fascinated that the Lolcats meme had crossed language barriers. About a year ago, I asked the Global Voices community whether Lolcats had hit their home communities and received a baffled shrug in response – funny pictures were being passed around, but no cute cat photos bearing funny captions. (A pair of GV’ers briefly ran LolQats, a site dedicated to images of people chewing Qat, enhanced with funny captions. These are the sort of jokes you make when Bahranis, Brazilians and Beninois end up sharing a house in Miami during new media conferences. Tragically, the image links on the site no longer seem to work. Here are some representative examples on another site, proving that all great ideas have multiple authors.)

So I was excited to see Russian speakers adding captions to cute photos of cats. I thought it was bizarre that Soviet-era kitsch should be the subject of the humor, but I didn’t bother to type captions into Google and get real translations… or read the comment threads, which include roughly a third of folks saying “That’s not a very good translation” and another third laughing at the folks who think the translations are real. So what’s wonderful is to discover both that a) Russian speakers are creating sweet, sappy, sentimental lolcats and truly snarky English speakers are creating meta-lolcats using said sappy lolcats and a heavy dose of cold-war nostalgia.

Ah, recursive humor. There’s a reason why my computer science professors wanted me to learn Lisp before setting me loose on teh Internetz.

Professor Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School, is focused on “Cosmoolitan Communications” for her forthcoming book, titled “Cultural Convergence”. Working with Ronald Inglehart of the World Values Survey, she’s studying the ways that communications impact the strength of national identity and the trust in outsiders. Her findings – which surprise some of her colleagues – suggest that increased cosmopolitan communications leads to more trust in others and reduced nationalism.

The context for her talk is accelerating connection through globalization, as tracked by surveys like the KOF Globalization index. As globalization increases, we see more opportunity for information to come across national borders. Some view this as a threat – thinkers like Herbert Schiller have suggested that the spread of corporate capitalism will lead towards the spread of American values at the expense of local norms. More recently, Benjamin Barber, in books like “Jihad versus McWorld”, suggests that American capitalism and culture are fundamentally intertwined. These theories have led UNESCO to worry that the availability of information from culturally exporting nations like the US could lead to a decrease in cultural diversity.

To study this, Norris has looked at the export of cultural goods, especially movies, television shows, radio shows and audio recordings. There’s a strong, linear relationship between cultural export and import – while a few nations like the US export a lot of culture and import comparatively little, in general it’s more common to see rich nations import and export a lot of culture, and to see poor countries import and export very little. (Her statistics cover only formal markets – obviously, there’s lots of black market content import that isn’t visible in these statistics.)

American cultural export has expanded over recent decades, and we now take for granted the idea that some countries are likely to dominate cultural discourse. There’s four possible outcomes to this situation:

- A convergence around American and Western culture and values. In this scenario, we’d expect to see minority groups lose their cultural heritage. Norris offers Bhutan as a country that disconnected rather than face this cultural loss, and has seen social changes come about since connecting to the internet and television in 1999.

- Polarization. In this scenario, we might see people encounter American culture and reject it based on its clash with traditional values.

- Hybridization. Cultures encounter one another and there’s a mutual exchange of ideas. The result is something like California cuisine – a little bit French, a little Italian, a little Mexican and a whole lot mixed up.

- The Firewall model. Cultural exports have expaned, but they only impact on cultural diversity if they cross four barriers. They’ve got to be accepted via “trade integration”, they’ve got to be permitted in an environment of media freedom, they need to reach audiences which may not have access to media through digital divides, and most critically, they need to cross cultural barriers. “You’ve learned values from your family, so you’re not always going to absorb these outside influences – you’re going to have some resistance to them.”

To test which of these models might apply, Norris looks at the World Values Survey and looks for relationships between questions about media use and those about national identity and trust in outsiders. Her expectation is that countries that are more connected to others – countries which rank highly on her “cosmopolitanism index” – will have greater trust in outsiders and a less strong sense of nationalism. In addition she expects a “cross-level interaction effect”, where people who live in globalized societies and experience a wide range of media will have an especially strong trust in outsiders and especially weak nationalistic characteristics.

For the most part, this turns out to be true. There’s a loose fit between cosmopolitanism and trust in outsiders, and parochial nations turn out to be less trusting of outsiders. The outliers are especially interesting – the Netherlands, which is extremely cosmopolitan, shows only moderate trust in outsiders. Norris speculates that this is a reaction to recent tensions around Muslim immigrant populations in the Netherlands, referencing the Theo Van Gogh murder. She points to a similar pattern in Germany, where tensions with Turkish immigrants may keep connection high and trust of outsiders only moderate.

For these models to be effective, Norris tells us, we need to control a wide variety of factors. Youth, she explains, tend to be more trusting that the elderly. The better educated one is, the more trusting of outsiders one tends to be. Controlling for these factors, she sees a positive correlation between cosmopolitanism and trust in outsiders, and a similar correlation between news media use and trust. There’s an amplification effect in the case of media users in cosmopolitan societies – they’re especially trusting of outsiders, less likely to be strongly nationalistic, and more likely to feel like they are citizens of the world.

She explains that there’s need for more work on the topic. Some nations have stronger nationalistic tendencies than others – behavior that’s common in the US, like flying the national flag, would be considered provocative in the UK. The fact that nationalism has different baselines in different countries makes comparison difficult. There’s a problem with self-selection biases and media use – people who consume media may be the peple most curious and interested in the outside world. And it’s hard to find data sources that accurately show cultural transmission in new media – the ITU and the UN track total internet users, but don’t have good statistics on whether people are encountering information outside their home countries. (I’m hoping to do some thinking on this topic and see if I can point the good professor in the right direction.)

I thought it was a fascinating talk, though I would offer two cautions. I don’t think it’s possible to accurately analyze cultural influence in developing nations by looking at import and export statistics. In very poor African countries, kids in isolated villages are watching pirated DVDs from the US on the one television in town, often powered by an auto battery. Cultural influence is much broader than financial influence. Second, I question whether nationalism and cosmopolitanism are actually opposed. In my experience working on Global Voices, I’ve met a large number of people who are fiercely proud of their homelands and also excited about being citizens of the world. I’d love to see a way of measuring openness that doesn’t unfairly demonize nationalism in the process.

I blogged about problems friends were having hosting Zimbabwean human rights sites on US webhosting company, Bluehost. In that post, I speculated that someone connected with the Mugabe government had alerted Bluehost to the Kubatana account as a way of harrassing an organization that’s often critical of the government.

That speculation was probably inaccurate. The situation with Bluehost apparently involves customers beyond Zimbabwe. Arash Abadpour, an Iranian student living in Canada, offers a translation from a blogpost on 1 Fathi about Bluehost shutting down Iranian blogs:

Since last week, Blue Host, the hosting service which is used for this very blog [and Kamangir as well], and the number one recommendation for WordPress hosting by WordPress itself, has adopted a policy of suspending its Iranian users. In some cases the bloggers have been given a short notice in order to back up their data and leave. This is despite Bluehost’s good reputation in the blogosphere.

The matter of fact is that many of these bloggers, including Arash Kamangir who blogs at kamangir.net, have no connection to the Iranian administration and have had to take use of a foreign hosting service in order to freely express their opinions.

The author is fairly sympathetic to Bluehost, noting that the company’s terms of service make clear that they will not host services operated by people in “Sanctioned Countries presently include, among others, Balkans, Belarus, Burma, Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Iraq, former Liberian Regime of Charles Taylor, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe.” I’ve argued previously that Bluehost’s terms of service are poorly written, use an outdated list of sanctioned countries and don’t draw an adequate distinction between sanctioned and non-sanctioned individuals.

Indeed, Bluehost now understands that their Terms of Service and their current enforcement measures are ill-concieved – after hearing from the US Treasury Department, they agreed to reinstate Kubatana’s website… though Kubatana decided to move to a webhost that is more aggressive in protecting the speech rights of its customers. My hope is that they’ll rewrite their terms of service and tell their abuse staff to stop shutting down Iranian, Syrian and Zimbabwean blogs.

The fear is that web hosting providers may decide it’s simply less trouble to prohibit host blogs in countries where some individuals are sanctioned. In the comment thread on Arash’s post, Esra’a of Mideast Youth notes that Go Daddy appears to be following similar guidelines and has refused to host sites for their community.

This would be a great opportunity for Bluehost to stand up as a defender of free speech and write a terms of service that makes clear they’ll protect speech rights of their users. I suspect my friend David Ardia at the Citizen Media Law Center would offer suggestions on a terms of service that keeps US companies out of trouble with the Treasury Department while protecting speech rights. So far, Bluehost hasn’t shown themselves likely to follow this path, but we can always hope.

In the meantime, I offer the advice I did in a previous blogpost – if you’re blogging from Sudan, Syria, Zimbabwe, Liberia or anywhere else that has recently been under US sanctions, find a hosting provider who will defend your rights to use their service. Talk to your webhost, make sure they understand who you and and what you’re doing. Don’t assume that no one will notice – that’s what happened to the sites that have been taken down in the past couple of weeks.

The Open Net Initiative, a project of the Berkman Center (my employer), Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Cambridge, has emerged as the gold standard for reporting on internet censorship around the world. With the cooperation of hundreds of researchers, ONI runs tests in dozens of countries and produces reports, usually one a year, that detail what sites are inaccessible in a particular country, and how they are blocked.

There’s one major problem with this approach – speed. When a website gets blocked in a particular country, that site’s administrator wants confirmation that her site is being blocked so she can lobby the government, or help her readers find other ways to read the site.

The folks at the Herdict project, a new effort being launched at the Berkman Center today, are interested in a different way of documenting web filtering and censorship. They’re asking users around the world to use the Herdict site or toolbar to report when they’re having trouble reaching a site. Herdict will coordinate reports and attempt to determine whether a site is being blocked by a government, an ISP or whether there’s a technical failure that’s preventing people from accessing a site.

The Herdict team offers a charming web video that explains how the tool works. I may be mistaken, but the voice of Shep the Sheep sounds suspiciously like that of Professor Jonathan Zittrain, the principal investigator behind the Herdict project.

I love the Herdict concept, though I’ve never warmed to the name, a pormanteau of “herd” and “verdict”. James Fallows offers two reasons to resist the name: “First, no one really likes to be thought of as part of a “herd.” A crowd, maybe (as in “crowdsourcing.”) Even a throng or a mob. But a herd? Second, the logo for the site includes pictures of sheep but none of cows. Cows make a herd; a group of sheep is a flock.”

He’s right, but don’t let the name keep you from joining the herd. Er, flock. It’s a cool idea, and for it to work, Herdict needs participants from around the world. Hope you’ll consider joining in.

While we’re on the subject of internet censorship, let me point you to the new manual published by the Sesawe project on circumventing internet censorship. The manual builds on existing content (including some things I’ve written) and adds original content to provide an overview of tools that can be used to evade internet censorship. It’s available under open licenses, can be downloaded and printed as a PDF, and should be a worthy companion to anyone trying to understand the world of proxies, TOR, Psiphon and other circumvention tools. Please check it out.

• Nigerian Accused in Scheme to Swindle Citibank – NYTimes.com
  A fascinating variant on the standard 419 scam – Nigerian scammers defraud tens of millions by pretending to be Ethiopian banking officials
  (tags: africa nigeria ethiopia 419 finance)
• Nigerian Accused in Scheme to Swindle Citibank – NYTimes.com
  A fascinating variant on the standard 419 scam – Nigerian scammers defraud tens of millions by pretending to be Ethiopian banking officials
  (tags: africa nigeria ethiopia 419 finance)

Some sort of secret signal went out, and everyone and their neighbor has posted a “death of newspapers” story since the beginning of the year, myself included. Polymeme, which is increasingly my go-to, first thing in the morning read, has listed at least a dozen stories this month, and their “media” tag includes roughly 50% crisis stories.

Rather than offering a taxonomy of depressing media stories, I’d prefer to point to the best of the bunch, a piece in the New Republic by Professor Paul Starr. Starr won the Pulitzer for his brilliant “The Creation of the Media“, which tracks the emergence of newspapers, telegraphs and radio in the US, England and Europe, and he’s got a historical perspective on media issues that many of the other authors opining – myself included – lack.

Starr offers the argument that the newspaper as the authoritative source for the media we need to participate in a democratic society may have had their moment in history. Starr sees papers as critical market intermediaries, matching buyers and sellers in specific localities. That market logic led them beyond just covering news to cover softer topics like arts and sports, hoping to broaden their audience, and led directly to a shift away from partisan journalism and towards standards of journalistic objectivity. (If you’re going to function as an effective market-maker, it’s no good to alienate half the population that doesn’t share your political views.)

While newspapers held this intermediary position – and especially when they were monopolies – they could hardly avoid making money. (Had Starr attempted to analyze the finances of my local newspaper, as I did some weeks back, he would have been unsurprised that the paper charged steep, monopoly rents to local advertisers, and probably would be unsurprised that the paper – independent of the corporate apparatus that supports it – is profitable.) But the Internet is the great disintermediator, and eventually it will no longer be possible to cross-subsidize public interest journalism with classified ads and four-color grocery store fliers.

Starr’s worry, like mine, is on the future of “difficult journalism” – deep investigative work focused on state capitals, on city finances and on international coverage. His worry – as politicians and businesspeople understand that the press is no longer watching, it becomes more tempting to bend the rules. Hence, his subtitle: “Hello to a New Era of Corruption”.

I’m particularly gratified to see Starr focus on something I’ve been thinking of as “the problem of choice”, noting that we read news differently online and offline. Starr believes that we’re losing something when we stop reading offline and primarily read online – we are less likely to have the same knowledge as our neighbors and more likely to become ideologically polarized:

Online, by contrast, [news consumers] do not necessarily see what would be front-page news in their city, and so they are likely to become less informed about news and politics as the reading of newspapers drops. On the other hand, just as more partisan viewers have more to watch on cable than on network television, so partisans have more to read and to discuss online than in the typical local newspaper. As a result, to the extent that the Internet replaces newspapers as a source of news, it may add to the tendencies that Prior has identified–greater disparities in knowledge between news dropouts and news junkies, as well as greater ideological polarization in both the news-attentive public and the news media.

Ultimately, Starr declares news to be a “public good”, both in the sense that it’s a neccesity for a participatory society and in the sense that it is a non-rivalrous good (if you read a news story, you don’t prevent me from reading it as well.) He notes that public goods are notoriously hard to produce, and that the temptation is to ask governments to do it for us. The downside, obviously, is that this makes it very difficult to cover a government critically. Starr sides with those who see non-profit models for journalism, but not without a great deal of caution and concern. Mostly, his prediction is that the newspaper as we know it – the main arbiter of what is and isn’t news in a particular location at a particular time – is gone and no one is sure what’s going to replace it.

Not happy news, by any means, but better argued and structured that any of the other essays on the topic I’ve read.

While there’s no shortage of folks drafting eulogies for the newspaper, no one has told the geeks who work inside newspapers. I doubt that the NYTimes techies were reacting to my rant about the architecture of serendipity, and the ways in which the paper frontpage forces serendipity, they’ve rolled out a very clever article skimmer. It doesn’t provide quite as much “bait” to hook you on a story as front-page blurbs do, but vastly more than the online edition does. And it’s got all sorts of clever keyboard commands that make browsing easier.

It’s possible that the NYTimes geeks may not be the folks who figure out how to unlock the potential of that remarkable newsgathering organization. The Times has released a collection of developer APIs, allowing access to very useful widgets, like the Times People pages. The examples offered of what one can do with these tools are pretty weak at present, but I know that I’ve printed out the API documentation and am sleeping with it under my pillow in the hopes of coming up with an innovative new ap.

It’s not just US newspapers that are innovating. My friend Mohamed Nanabhay of Al Jazeera talks to the Journalism.co.uk blog about technical innovation at the Qatar news company. Al Jazeera is sharing video content with the Independent newspaper in the UK, releasing lots of material under Creative Commons and partnering with Ushahidi to visualize violence during the recent Gaza conflict. Most folks in the US, I find, misunderstand Al Jazeera so badly that they won’t look to the company for journalistic innovation, which is a shame, as Mohamed and his team are one of the groups that understands that media companies need to break disciplinary boundaries and find new ways to deliver news around the world.

• %u042Folcats
  English translations of Russian-language Lolcats. Most appear to focus on making cats spout Soviet-era pro-communist dialog. Good fun.
  (tags: blogs internet humor history russia memes lolcats satire)
• Death of newspapers | Salon
  A particularly good "death of journalism" analysis, with a focus on serendipity and breaking homophily traps (though not using that language, unsurprisingly)
  (tags: media economics journalism blogging newspapers publishing newspaper reporting serendipity homophily)
• BBC NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | The mystery of Ireland's worst driver
  The worst driver in Northern ireland is a scofflaw named Prawo Jazdy, who appears to change address every time he gets a ticket. Of course, that's because "Prawo Jazdy" means "driver's license" in Polish, and linguistic barriers continue to cause problems in an increasingly connected Europe…
  (tags: funny language bbc ireland uk poland disconnect)
• RHYTHM RISING FILM TRAILER Video by mantse ARYEEQUAYE – MySpace Video
  Trailer for Rhythm Rising, a film about the Hiplife – Ghanaian HipHop – scene. Good stuff, including a pissed off Reggie Rockstone, who understandably believes that everyone is copying his shit.
  (tags: hiphop film documentary highlife hiplife music Ghana africa)

The nature of breaking news is changing. Recent breaking stories, like the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, have been simulcast on mainstream news sites and via social media like blogs and twitter. To stay up to date, I’ve increasingly found myself triangulating between traditional and new media, sometimes frustrated by the speed of rumor spread in new media, sometimes moved by the personal, direct and eyewitness perspectives I’ve gotten from individuals directly affected by attacks.

The (confusing, apparent, partial, incomplete) coup in Madagascar is the first event I’ve been able to watch only through social media.

Madagascar has had a political crisis for several weeks. The may of the capital city, Antananarivo, and opposition leader Andry Rajoelina has been urging supporters to occupy government buildings, allowing his TGV party to take control of the government. Rajoelina argues that he’s taking control from a corrupt and dictatorial president, Marc Ravalomanana, who he accuses of manipulating the Malagasy economy to benefit his own businesses. President Ravalomanana views Rajoelina’s actions as a coup, and has fired him as mayor of Antananarivo and is struggling to maintain control.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been tense standoffs between protesters and government forces. One of these standoffs descended into burning and looting, killing dozens. Another involved the government firing on protesters as they marched towards the President’s residence. I’ve detailed some of the events on my blog, and Global Voices has very thorough coverage of the events.

Today, Rajoelina’s supporters have apparently seized four ministries – the police, interior, education and “territory” ministries. According to my friend Lova Rakatomalala, “Consensus so far is that seizing of ministry buildings does not give TGV the control of the government.”

It would be hard to get a sense for that consensus by reading English-language media. Google News doesn’t have any breaking news from Madagascar – my last search turned up a 13-hour old story about the opposition’s threats to occupy buildings (and dozens of stories about the Dreamworks film.) While the New York Times’s Barry Bearak is one of the few US reporters to have meaningfully addressed the Madagascar story, the Times site doesn’t even have a newswire story about the current situation. And while my French sucks, my sense is that there’s not a ton of coverage there – a short piece just went up on Le Monde based on an AFP story.

So I’m doing what my Malagasy friends across the net are doing – religiously watching the #Madagascar tag on Twitter. That means I’m primarily reading Thierry Ratsizehena, a marketing and social media expert in Antananarivo, who is listening closely to news via television and radio, and sharing what he knows with his Twitter readers. Lova, who’s in the US, is translating his tweets into English and adding context and commentary. The two make a pretty effective news bureau, helping interested readers understand the few facts we’ve got from the ground and the numerous unanswered questions.

What we know:
- Four ministries are occupied by the opposition TGV. The party’s leader, Rajoelina, has asked his supporters to continue occupying the buildings, and some supportive crowds are surrounding buildings and chanting.

What we think we know:
- The President hasn’t been heard from, but his Prime Minister is evidently calling members of parliament to ensure they have support.
- The armed forces held TGV forces outside their building for some time today, and eventually let some TGV figures inside to negotiate, perhaps to avoid violence.
- The events today appear to be largely nonviolent.

What we don’t know:
- Whether TGV will continue seizing ministries, or whether the President will try to use the armed forces to oust TGV and arrest Rajoelina
- How much public support there is either for the existing government or for TGV.

Confused? Yeah, so’s everyone watching this story. Which is why I wish we had more reporters on the ground and more analysis coming out.

The population of Madagascar is more than 20 million – roughly that of Australia. I realize this isn’t a helpful comparison, but I can’t help returning to the idea that there are roughly twice as many people in Madagascar than in Israel and Palestine, a part of the world where even minor political developments are followed around the world with passionate interest. I understand that the future of Madagascar probably won’t affect the future of US/Middle East relationships and that the Malagasy diaspora tends to be a lot quieter than supporters of Israel and Palestine… but it seems crazy that there’s apparently a single AFP stringer bringing this conflict to the world’s attention.

My work over the years suggests that you’re lots less likely to get media attention if you’re poor, far away, speak languages other than English and not involved with global terror or American military operations. Madagascar loses on all fronts. I’m proud that Global Voices is doing a good job of covering this story, but really wish we had a bit more company.