/Culture/ Blogging from the edge
15/04/2009 | Filed under Discover > Culture
Whether you’re living in a warzone or cycling across continents, getting your experiences online can be a huge challenge, discovers Paul Douglas, as he meets some of the world’s most extreme bloggers
“Get yourself set up with a Twitter account. It’s a nice, low-cost way of letting people know if you get into trouble or are kidnapped. You can agree on a keyword with friends to use if they need to start mobilising help for you and then you can just text that word when you are in such a situation.” That’s the advice of Alex Strick van Linschoten. Sounds overly paranoid for everyday blogging, but then again, he’s no everyday blogger.
Based in Afghanistan, van Linschoten is the only journalist in Kandahar who isn’t embedded with the military. He feels his ‘free-roaming’ blog, From the Frontline, plays an important role in bringing the reality of the conflict to the outside world. “Everyone’s doing embeds,” he says. “It’s almost the only reportage you read that comes out of southern Afghanistan. I’d rather look at things from the other side of the fence.” Not being attached to the military comes with its own challenges, he admits, not least the heightened physical danger he puts himself in as a result. But there are compensations. “From here in my house in Kandahar City I can get in a car at any time and travel to where I need to go, without having to worry about getting permissions or military escorts,” he explains. “Most of the journalists living on the big ISAF/NATO military base have severe restrictions on their movements. I’m not saying we shouldn’t cover the military effort in Afghanistan, just that I’m not interested in it, and I think we also have a moral duty to write about what’s happening to Afghans. Unfortunately, there’s been very little interest in their side of the story, particularly at a time when news coverage of Afghanistan in general is on the wane.”
Van Linschoten turned to blogging because he was frustrated with traditional media outlets. “I’d tried working as a freelancer in Afghanistan a few years ago, but too often the angle of the story was being decided on in advance in London or wherever,” he says. “In any case, the story will always be more complicated than can be fitted into a 700 or 1,000-word piece. On the blog, I can write long, unedited pieces to my heart’s content. Ultimately, it’s also a way of giving a more personal angle to the stories that I’m writing and I can embed video and sound on my blog to give readers more of an idea of what it’s actually like to be here in Kandahar.”
Power shortages
Keeping the blog updated is fraught with difficulties. “There might be technical issues with the website. The internet may not be fast enough to upload pictures, or to upload videos from my Flip Camera onto YouTube. Or there might not be electricity, so we have to turn on a generator,” says van Linschoten. “Otherwise, if you’re outside the city it’s impossible to upload as there’s no internet connection. So I use Twitter a lot, updating via text message from my Afghan mobile phone when I’m travelling around in the south. Sometimes I have to email my blog posts to a friend to upload for me.”
In 2006 Ben Hammersley worked as a multimedia reporter in Afghanistan for Guardian Unlimited. He then reported from Turkey in the run-up to the general elections in 2007 for the BBC, posting to YouTube and Flickr. He also covered the 2008 Pakistan general elections for MSN.co.uk.
Reporting on a blog saves time, says Hammersley, and it’s this fact – rather than the visual style of a blog – that makes it an attractive medium for him to use. “The content management systems used in blogs are just so much better for fast-moving journalism than traditional large-media CMSs,” he says. They also gave him the chance to produce different material than that which was coming from traditional media. “Most of the time it was more diary-like and perhaps a little richer, in terms of multimedia. But generally I found that the blog style doesn’t suit war reporting as much as you might think it would. This is because a lot of foreign news is a mix of short periods of action, with long waits in between. It’s hard to make that into an interesting blog.”
The need for a web connection is a constant struggle. “You need a satellite phone and a clear line of sight to the horizon,” says Hammersley. “In Afghanistan that can be hard; in Beirut, your hotel Wi-Fi changes things completely; the Philippine jungle makes both impossible.”
You also need to carry a lot of extra gear around with you – and to get used to it breaking. “I’ve filled a few PowerBooks with sand from helicopter downdrafts. That sounds terribly glamorous until you’ve done it a few times and found your screen is going cloudy.”
Extreme travel
As well as blogging for journalism, many people choose to blog their travels – and the more extreme the travel, the greater the challenge. Nevertheless, Dame Ellen MacArthur managed it from on-board the BT yacht and David Hempleman-Adams succeeded in blogging during his record-breaking crossing of the Atlantic in an open-basket balloon in 2007.
Mark Beaumont, who recently completed his record-breaking attempt to cycle round the world (taking just 194 days and 17 hours), also chose to keep friends, family and fans updated on his progress via his website. “It made sense to try to share the journey with as many people as possible and the technology is there to let me do that in a pretty lightweight and efficient way,” he says. Packed onto his bike were a laptop, GPS, mini DV camera and a Panasonic Lumix digital camera for stills, but most of the site updates were done via the more conventional methods of mobile calls and text messaging.
“If you were to do it all yourself, outside of the networks of the western world it’s very difficult to keep your units charged and to get onto the internet to upload,” Beaumont explains. “It’s almost impossible to upload video even if you compress it, but even photographs and audio are a huge challenge. I often resorted to throwing them onto a pen drive and mailing them back from wherever I could. It was important for me to keep my blog as current as possible, but it’s not as simple as it would be if you were doing it in Europe or most of the States.”
Going it alone
On 30 April 2003, Lois Pryce jacked in an unfulfilling job at the BBC to ride 20,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina on her 225cc Yamaha dirt bike. No support vans or TV crew – just Pryce and her bike. She wasn’t exactly loaded up with technology, either, carrying no laptop or mobile phone. A Nikon FM2 SLR camera was the most advanced bit of kit she took with her on the journey – and it isn’t even digital. In her book Lois on the Loose, in which she recounts her adventure, Pryce reveals that it was only a question from her mother that prompted her to create a website of her travels:
“Are you going to have a mobile phone with you?” said my mum when I called her with the news later that day.
“No, but…” I paused, as an idea presented itself to me, “I’ll do a website, so you can keep track of me.”
“Oh dear,” she replied, “Does that mean I’ll have to get a computer?”
“It started out as just something to keep my family and friends informed of what I was up to,” Pryce later explained to us. “My brother works as a software engineer and computer programmer and he offered to make me a trip website for my birthday present.”
But with no laptop or mobile phone available to her on the journey, keeping the site updated would require a rather different approach. “I wrote my updates and emailed them back home,” says Pryce. “On my first trip I used an SLR film camera and I’d get the photos developed wherever I was. I’d then either scan them in an internet cafe or, if that wasn’t possible, I’d just post them back home – old school! On my second trip I used a digital camera and would upload the pictures to a photo sharing site, which could then be accessed back in the UK.”
Pryce’s second trip took place in 2006, when she rode 10,000 gruelling miles from London to Cape Town, which she wrote about in her second book Red Tape and White Knuckles. This time, she upped her quota of technology items – to two. “I had a Sony DSC-W70 digital camera and a USB memory stick. That was it!”
Why the lack of gear? “I was travelling on a small motorcycle so luggage space was limited and knowing that I’d probably be able to find internet cafes every couple of weeks, I decided not to take a laptop,” Pryce explains. “Also, I was riding thousands of miles of very rough terrain in extreme heat, so I didn’t want to have any fancy kit to worry about. I’m a big believer in keeping things simple and the less stuff you have, the less you have to worry about.”
It didn’t stop her posting updates, but she did have to rely on finding somewhere to post from. “I’d try to update my site every couple of weeks. It’s always easy to find internet cafes in big cities, even in darkest Africa, but I had to plan ahead a bit if I knew I was going to be out in the wilds for a while. Sometimes an internet cafe would crop up in the most unlikely little place, but the connection would be patchy, even in big cities, and sometimes it could go down for no reason, or a power cut would occur just when I’d written a really long email. You soon get used to saving your work every few seconds!”
Do it yourself
So you want to blog your own trip? “Just go,” says Ben Hammersley. “Don’t wait for someone to send you: they never will.” Alex Strick van Linschoten agrees: “First thing is to get out there. Obviously, you have to consider the risks, reasons and implications of what you’re doing or going to do, but too often you can get locked into a cycle of doubt and uncertainty that prevents you from going to certain places to work. Make sure you have a good support system in place that allows you to get material online, even when you’re having difficulties with connections.”
You’ll also need a support system, says Mark Beaumont. “There’s no connectivity in a lot of places, so make sure you have a friend back at base camp who can update the site for you. It’s so frustrating when you’re out there but have no way of getting connected for another two or three weeks. As good as the technologies are, the most reliable method is still picking up the phone.”
But if it’s a trip for fun rather than breaking records or reporting from a warzone, Lois Pryce has a different suggestion. “Leave the gadgets at home and keep it simple,” she advises. “Don’t let technology get in the way of your adventure!”
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Comments
Penny / 16/04/2009 / 00:15 / http://www.tvshark.com/
I also recommend Twitter like Alex incase you ever need to get message out in an emergency while you are overseas. I did this on my last trip and it was not only calming but useful for my friends as they followed my trip.
justjenny / 19/04/2009 / 15:54 / http://www.focusumass.org
i just can imagine, with the bullet and bom that happen.. they still manage to write their blog.. bravo to you all guys...
