What It Takes to Build a Professional Tunisia News Website: The Example of Creating Meshkal
A Discussion with:
FADIL ALIRIZA Journalist, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of: Mesh-Kal.com
“Meshkal (the Arabic word for Kaleidoscope) is an online site launched in April 2019. It aims to report high-quality, objective news about Tunisia with high frequency. Meshkal aims for high standards of professionalism, including in each article clear and understandable datelines and bylines, multiple sources of information and often opposing perspectives on events, and the crucial historical, social, political, and/or cultural context for new developments that are missing from so many articles that assume the readers already know all the background. While launching in English is primarily the result of the current limited operational capacity of Meshkal’s team, our goal is to move towards producing every report in both Arabic and English. We also believe it is important to create spaces in which increasingly Anglophone North Africans can produce news themselves, about themselves, in both English and Arabic.
For now, Meshkal is an entirely volunteer-run project, but it is seeking to eventually raise money in order to improve our website, expand our coverage, and pay our contributors. In principle we don’t see journalism as an industry, news as a commodity, or readers as consumers. We see journalism as a calling, news as an educational resource, and readers as our community and as ourselves.” Fadil Aliriza, Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder of Meshkal
Fadil Aliriza is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Tunisia news website Meshkal. He holds a Masters degree in Middle East politics from SOAS, London. He has been working as a freelance journalist in Tunisia since 2011, and conducted policy research on various topics relating to Tunisian politics.
I Wednesday, January 22, 2020 || 5:30 to 7:30 pm I
ADMISSION FREE
LOCATION:Tunisia Office Center for Middle Eastern Studies Harvard University, Les jardins du Lac II, Tunis STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20200122T223000Z DTEND:20200123T003000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR