After many sleepless nights and research, I’ve decided to make some changes to the structure of the website. However I still believe that freedom of the press and people’s right to speak up is related, but after facing reality, I’ll have to unfortunately get rid of the “not trending” page 💔. That is because I feel like it’s kind of irrelevant now, the inspiration behind having it was sparked during the US elections. Around last September, major international newspapers kept covering the US elections explicitly while neglecting major news that were very important in other countries at the time. However, I’ll keep the dog-ear page (who knew this was a word!) style and link to either “Experience Journalism” or “Take an Action” up there.
Right now, I’m struggling with ’spot the real article’ section due to the removal of most of Jamal Khashoggi related articles in Saudi newspapers. I now have two options, either:
1- I find other news that were reported differently due to where it was reported,
OR
2- Change this section and turn it into ‘Guess where?’ with options of screenshots of ‘no results’ and actual news articles.
I’m kind of leaning towards the second option because it’s less time consuming, research wise, and because I want to include something about Jamal Khashoggi, and also Latifa Al Maktoum, the “missing” Emirati princess whose news are all over the world except in the GCC region.
I’ve contacted a web-developer whose work I admire so much to check out my website in the near future when it’s animated and ready-ish, and he agreed 🙌🏼. I’m planning on putting everything on GitHub once I figure out how to code some sections so users can test it and share their feedback with me.
I’ll email Yasmin Elayat, as Nancy suggested last semester. I was hesitant to contact Yasmin earlier because I won’t be doing anything in VR, but I recently found out that her thesis was about the Egyptian revolution (if I’m not mistaken) so I’ll ask her about it and also planning to discuss the whole freedom of the press issue with her, a fellow Egyptian.
I’m now in the midst of looking for Arab/American, or Arab/European, or Chinese/American, or Chinese/European journalists to maybe discuss if what I have so far makes sense or not and compare their experiences in both of their countries.
Still hoping Mohamed Bazzi would answer my email(s). 🙏🏼