Blog - Homelands Productions

July 15, 2009

The End of WORKING As We Know It

The profile of Kenyan marathon runner Salina Kosgei is the 29th and final feature in the WORKING series. Kenya is the 25th country we’ve visited.

It’s hard to believe that the series is coming to an end. We set out two and a half years ago to create a sort of group portrait of the working world. The best place to see if we succeeded is here. Click on the “Listen” button or the “Radio Stories” tab. You can hear the audio, see photos, and read reporters’ notebooks for each profile. You can also check out the Worker Browser, a spiffy web tool we created for this project.

As we have reported in this space, WORKING won the 2008 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Radio Feature Reporting from the Society for Professional Journalists. Also, Gregory Warner’s portrait of a miner from the Democratic Republic of Congo won a New York Festivals Silver World Medal in the “human interest” category. The series as a whole was a finalist under “community profiles.”

A huge thank-you to the many fine people who have made this project possible, and especially to our friends at Marketplace. It’s been a lovely run!

July 15, 2009

Salina Kosgei, Runner

Salina Kosgei was the 10th and youngest child of poor farmers in the highlands of western Kenya. The family home had no electricity or plumbing; Salina got her first shoes at age 14. As a kid, she used to run 10 kilometers to school, barefoot, just for the fun of it. Twenty years later, she’s still running, not for kicks but for a living. It’s been a long slog, with plenty of ups and downs. Then this year she found herself elbow to elbow with the defending champ in the most prestigious marathon in the world, with the finish line in sight.

Jon Miller’s profile is scheduled to air on Marketplace on Thursday, July 16. To hear it, read more about Salina, and see 23 terrific photos by Kenyan photographer Stevie Mann, click here. The story will be posted around showtime.

July 6, 2009

Free Indeed

What a relief to hear that Iason Athanasiadis is in Dubai, confirmedly free! We are anxious to hear what happened from Iason himself. We know that Roxana Saberi, another colleague who was held in Iran, endured much during her detention, physically and psychologically. Chilling to note that many other journalists, all Iranian, are still being held. Our thoughts are with them.

July 6, 2009

Waiting for Iason

Rather than rewrite yesterday’s post (is that even allowed?) we thought we’d say that news of Iason’s release, which has been widely reported, is still at the “Iranian foreign ministry officials confirmed” level of certainty. As of this hour, we haven’t seen proof that Iason is out of custody. We’ll either confirm the news when we hear it or sneak back and delete this post (surely that is allowed – you may not be able to rewrite history, but you can always erase it!). Still, feeling hopeful.

July 5, 2009

Iason is Free!

Great news today from Tehran. Colleague Iason Athanasiadis, who was detained by Iranian authorities after reporting on the disputed elections last month, was released after more than two weeks in detention. The government of Greece and officials of the Greek Orthodox Church had been pushing hard for this. According to today’s news reports, Iason was the only non-Iranian journalist being held. Things in Iran are clearly in turmoil after yesterday’s announcement by leading clerics that the election results were invalid and the government crackdown unjustifiable. Anyway, welcome back Iason!

June 29, 2009

Friend of Homelands Held in Iran

Iason Athanasiadis, an extraordinary young freelance writer, radio producer and photographer, was detained by Iranian authorities on June 19 while trying to board a plane to leave the country. Iason had been covering the contested elections there. Homelands Productions joins many other media organizations in calling for his release. We know Iason as an intelligent, fair-minded, compassionate reporter with deep knowledge of the Middle East and Central Asia. A 2008 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Iason was raised in Greece and educated in England and Iran. He holds a degree in Arabic and Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford and a masters degree in Persian and Contemporary Iranian Studies from the Tehran School of International Relations. You can read and see some of Iason’s work at http://www.iason.ws.

P.S. You can read an op-ed about Iason and his detention by Homelands Productions co-founder Sandy Tolan on Salon.com.

June 18, 2009

Babu Hussein, Shipbreaking Worker

Ismael “Babu” Hussein works as an assistant in one of Bangladesh’s giant shipbreaking yards, where armies of laborers dismantle huge old vessels with little more than hammers and blowtorches. The work is perilous, the bosses abusive, the hours exhausting. Babu’s reward? Just over two dollars a day, and nightmares about being crushed by giant sheets of steel. Pretty heavy stuff for a 13-year-old kid.

You can hear Sandy Tolan‘s profile of Babu on Marketplace on Thursday, June 18th. There are great photos and an excellent introduction to the issues of shipbreaking and child labor at the WORKING websites – http://marketplace.org/segments/working and http://working.homelands.org.

Please let us know what you think!

Jon

May 30, 2009

Brandon Davies, Banker

Brandon Davies‘ work is all about risk. After 32 years at Barclays Bank, he decided to try his luck as an independent operator. He quickly found himself with six or seven different jobs. He was hired to head an international association of risk professionals. He was recruited to the boards of two new banks with ties to the developing world. He began trading equities and currencies, using his own money. He helped set up one-off insurance and property deals. Risk, he told producer Sean Cole, is how we learn and grow as people. We should embrace it, not avoid it. At least that’s what he said last summer, when Sean spent a few days with him in London. Then the global financial system collapsed. Sean took a deep breath and called him back.

The profile of Brandon Davies aired on Marketplace on the 28th of May. It is the 27th profile in the WORKING series. For those of you in the public radio world, please note that all but the most recent profiles are now available on PRX.

Of course you can hear all the profiles, and see slideshows and read reporter’s notebooks, at the Worker Browser site, which was created especially for this project. While you’re there, why not tell the world what you think about your job?

Cheers,

Jon

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About Homelands

WHAT WE ARE

Homelands Productions is an independent nonprofit journalism cooperative. Since our founding in 1989, we have reported from more than 60 countries, produced nine special series for public radio and television, and won 22 national and international awards.

We also serve as a nonprofit fiscal sponsor for projects that excite us, and our Public Interest Reporting Defense Fund helps journalists whose work has gotten them in trouble.