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Curious minds select the most fascinating podcasts from around the world. Discover hand-piqd audio recommendations on your favorite topics.
piqer for: Boom and bust Health and Sanity Global finds Doing Good
Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
Grenfell: A Poem Saying More Than Any News Report Could
London's Grenfell Tower is in the headlines today: "One Month On". Rather than posting one of the news stories, I've chosen an unusual piq, in the form of a poem. It’s not often I feel that journalism mightn’t be the best way to convey a story (but as a journalist, I might be biased somewhat ...) However, when I read this impassioned piece by Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri about the devastating fire, it hit me like no news report had.
As news about the fire and the highly flammable panels stuck to the outside of the building spread last month, I – like many – felt the anger and injustice of it all grow inside me. And then I read Okri’s words, which conveyed these feelings exactly. The sentences rang in my ears long after I read them, so I wanted to share the poem here. It is also worth listening to the spoken version on Channel 4 News.
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There’s cladding everywhere. Political cladding,
Economic cladding, intellectual cladding — things that look good
But have no centre, have no heart, only moral padding.
They say the words but the words are hollow.
They make the gestures and the gestures are shallow.
Their bodies come to the burnt tower but their souls don’t follow.
