Category: Dispatches

Blog posts on media, introspection, society, and more.

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Swiss Legacy: WRS wins 3 Murrow awards after privatization!

I am proud to give some bitter-sweet news today:
my work for World 2014_MurrowAwardsLogoFINALRadio Switzerland won the station three Edward R. Murrow awards from the RTDNA!  This is a huge honor.  It is bitter-sweet, though, because the WRS that won these awards is no more: the station was privatized in 2013, and now lives on as a privately-held, commercial, local station for the Lake Geneva region.  The news department which won these awards was disbanded along with the previous public service member WRS.

As I pointed out last year, when our work won an incredible five Murrows, World Radio Switzerland won in the international category, Region 14, for a small market station.  “Small market” is defined (under one description I found) as one serving an audience of fewer than 1.4 million people.  WRS’s main market is Geneva, served by FM, and has about 190,000 residents.  Before privatization, it also had listeners elsewhere in the country through digital radio.

Here’s a list of the award-winning stories:

INTERNATIONAL, SMALL MARKET RADIO STATION: Feature Reporting
Davos talks about how to close the gender gap (Vincent Landon/Tony Ganzer)

INTERNATIONAL, SMALL MARKET RADIO STATION: News Series
Taking Stock of a Destroyed Swiss River (Tony Ganzer)

INTERNATIONAL, SMALL MARKET RADIO STATION: Use of Sound
First Stand-Alone Temple Opens in Switzerland (Tony Ganzer)

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Hindu temple story wins National Headliner, Religion Reporting Award!

UPDATE: This story also won first place Radio or Podcast Religion Report of the Year from the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA)!!  I am humbled and honored to have won this award, and to have been welcomed by the Hindu community in Trimbach to share their temple and puja with the world.

A bit of good news on this Friday evening: my story profiling the first stand-alone Hindu temple in Switzerland as won a third place National Headliner Award!  The awards were announced today by the Press Club of Atlantic City.

As readers of this site might already know, my previous station was sold and turned into a commercial, local station, focusing its resources on sales instead of journalism, leaving me to rediscover my homeland.  Despite this, our work produced before the sale–and my inevitable exodus from Switzerland–is still eligible for some awards.  This temple story is a version of a WRS story I expanded for Deutsche Welle, which distributes some program offerings to US public radio stations…hence my eligibility in this US prize!

Horns and drums are used to purify the air in this newly inaugurated Hindu temple in Trimbach—about halfway between Zurich and Basel.
Listen to the story from Deutsche Welle

Awards are, of course, not the most important thing in life.  But given that WRS as I knew it is no more, this recognition from my peers is a nice tribute to work done in my former life.

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Perils in aggregation journalism: public or ‘public’

Twitter is inherently a social networking site for making short but unquestionably public statements about everything and anything.  As you likely see in my Twitter feed to the left of this post, my Tweets are mostly about journalism, media, or international relations–my dominant fields of interest and study.  My comments are ones that I would defend in person, because they are made in the public sphere.  There is no expectation of privacy in Tweeting, unless done through the moderately helpful “Direct Message” system.  Twitter might be compared to a bullhorn letting its users send brief thoughts into a noisy and confusing web space.

There is an increasing trend in journalism to aggregate Tweets by topic or user into “news stories.”  Chief among the tools for this Twitter journalism is Storify, which organizes selected Tweets to form a narrative.  This example from Canadian CTV news shows how it works…you list the Tweets to tell a story, and the journalist doesn’t necessarily need to talk to anyone directly.  The Tweets are taking the place of interviews, in some cases.  This is annoying, and a result of a race for posting “news” quicker in the digital age.  Why talk to someone when you can just post their Tweets? Continue reading “Perils in aggregation journalism: public or ‘public’”

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The winter that just won’t end

It doesn’t matter where you live, but there seems to be some variation of this weather wisdom: “If you don’t like the weather in [insert your town, region, state of being], wait five minutes and it will change.”  I am fairly certain that this is not a new saying, and is not directly related to the increasing intensity of climate change (though it probably isn’t helping.)

My relocation to Ohio has come (lucky me) during a particularly rough winter.  I am told Ohio winters traditionally aren’t light, with the last decade being an exception.  But this year has seen a suite of heavy snows in concert with the Polar Vortex, which turned neighborhoods into icicles…and that is only a slight exaggeration.

It is winter.  Fine.  Switzerland has snow. The Northwest U.S. has snow.  So I am not foreign to fresh powder and bitter cold.  But the oscillating between that bitterness and Spring-like sunshine and warmth is frustrating.

Terminal Tower

I am fully aware of the fact that this region of the United States deals with such oscillation every season.  The shifts in weather, humidity, hot, and cold are blamed for the asphalt-pocked holes we call roads here. (I inverted asphalt and holes on purpose)  But the problem this Winter, and the argument for the effects of climate change, is that the extremes are extending beyond norms.  We might expect an extreme weather event every 10 years, not three in a season.

I reported a story from Kandersteg in 2012, I think, after severe flooding tore up roads, and endangered the town.  Fortunately the damage was minimal, but the worry was real: this tourist destination and home to an international scout center was inundated with concerned messages, wondering if it would be open for the coming season.  A local official told me there was never any danger it wouldn’t open…but he was a little concerned that they had two “once in a century” floods in quick succession.

These types of stories are becoming more and more frequent.  While I might just be griping about an annoyingly inconsistent winter, the extreme weather events are disconcerting if just for their frequency.  I would hope that things will stabilize, eventually, but in the meantime I’ll dress warm, and be prepared for a heat wave, every day.

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Trekking East: Holiday Edition

Moon rising

I have fancied myself a fairly prolific traveler in the last years, stretching the bounds of my passport and camera across mostly European locales.  I was lucky enough to see sights in Norway, Germany, France, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland, Greece, Egypt, Ireland, and Canada, since 2008.  Each journey has its own set of challenges; in Greece, I wasn’t sure if the protestors from television would overrun my family as we climbed the Acropolis (they didn’t); or in the Czech Republic, I had to try to work as a reporter and snag interviews while not knowing any Slavic languages and having no experience there.  The challenges are what make trips exciting and worthwhile, though…at least in theory.

My troupe’s latest journey set us onto America’s roadways, moving all of our things, by car, from Washington State to Ohio.  Cleveland will be our new home, one that we are eager to embrace and settle into after months of transition from Switzerland to the United States.  But this car journey is an epic feat for even regular drivers, and I hadn’t driven more than a few hours in the four years I lived abroad.  To move us to Ohio would take more than 30 hours of driving time, spread through five long days.

Continue reading “Trekking East: Holiday Edition”

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Lessons from a Master’s

Visiting Campus

Editor’s Note: Visiting CampusIn November 2013, I completed my M.A. in International Relations and World Order from the University of Leicester.  I had completed the research degree over two years in my ‘spare time,’ trying to read and write where I could.  The degree could be completed entirely by distance learning, though I visited campus and met with my adviser in 2012–it helped to reinforce some of the thoughts I had while locked away in solitary study.  I was asked to write some thoughts for future students about the challenges of distance learning, and I thought they might be worth posting to my website as well.

It’s valuable to admit to oneself that earning a post-graduate degree, especially by distance learning, can be an exhausting, rewarding trial.  Once that admission is internalized, one can form a strategy to making it to graduation.  I knew earning a Master’s would be difficult, but I didn’t really know what that meant until the course began.

Continue reading “Lessons from a Master’s”

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‘Protecting’ the (Canadian) border

Contraband

I will admit that my family is perhaps a little more internationally-minded than the average American family, but we really were just looking for lunch when we headed into Canada one Friday.  When we were in Switzerland a regular outing would be to take the train to Germany or France for shopping and lunch.  The border was so close, just asking to be crossed.  The Schengen zone has made visa-free travel the rule in Europe, and crossing borders is as natural as a daily commute. (In fact, many border-crossers live and work in different countries)  For the USA, borders are considered a little more serious areas of security and protection.  U.S. citizens now need passports to get into Canada and back, and have long been profiled and searched while coming through land-crossings from Mexico.

Still, my troupe is fresh from Europe, with a slightly less sense of danger while around borders.  This is why we decided to take a day trip into British Columbia one day, just to find a restaurant and then head home.  In all my traveling, from Athens to Oslo to Cairo, I had never been to Canada.  So we set our plans, not knowing the interrogation to come.

Continue reading “‘Protecting’ the (Canadian) border”

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