Seasoned reporter Lara Setrakian quit a coverted job as a Middle East correspondent to co-found the online news site, Syria Deeply. The portal is dedicated to a single topic – the conflict in Syria – and has an innovative approach to news gathering. It serves as a landing page for pertinent news on the conflict, combining original reporting from the field with aggregated material. It also includes a plethora of digital storytelling tools from interactive maps and timelines to SoundCloud commentary and tweets.

Setrakian left her cushy TV job (her words) with Bloomberg and ABC News because she felt the mainstream media coverage of the Syria crisis was difficult to follow with chaotic storylines instead of thorough reporting on the war and its humanitarian consequences.

In an interview with onMedia’s Jannis Hagmann, Setrakian talks about how she wants to fuse traditional journalism with startup culture and reform the coverage of global crises.

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Real treasures can be found in the archives of the state broadcasters Radio the Voice of Vietnam, Radio Nepal and the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation: original audio recordings from the 1930s, historic speeches, old musical recordings. All of that would be lost without painstaking restoration and archiving work.
The three Asian broadcasters have been professionalizing their methods of archiving and digitizing audio tape as part of a long-term DW-AKADEMIE project. At this year’s International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives annual conference held in September 2011 in Frankfurt, Germany, three head archivists showed how their countries were preserving their cultural heritage with archive management and highly modern techniques.

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