Nairobi photographer Boniface Mwangi is fed up with his country’s politicians. To raise awareness, he’s taking an in-your-face approach with a graffiti campaign, political art show and online newspaper.
This audio package first appeared in Deutsche Welle’s Generation Change podcast and blog: [mp3] [html].
Photos and additional reporting by Mike Elkin.
Smartphone owners know all about battery anxiety: Spend too long playing games and the battery icon flashes ”empty” the next time you need to make a call. For drivers of electric cars, the problem is more serious: They can’t just walk over with a 20-liter jug of electricity from the nearest charging station, and even if they do manage to glide into a station on their last electrons, it could take hours to top off a car battery. Continue reading EV Battery Swapping’s First Real Test
A broadcaster doing a Moon package for BBC5’s Pods and Blogs interviewed me about the ApolloPlus40 Twitter feed I’ve been working on for Nature.
New experience to be on the receiving end of an interview. The segment containing my interview is available for download here: [mp3, 4:18].
I completed my reporting internship with Nature near the end of June. My final work on staff there included recording a news chat for the weekly podcast about the ApolloPlus40 Twitter project I mentioned in my last post. I also discussed an ancient bone flute found in Germany. You can download the newschat here [mp3, 7:05], or the entire podcast from Nature. For the following week’s podcast I interviewed Elly Tanaka about her work on how salamanders regenerate lost limbs. Listen to my interview here [mp3, 6:15], get the whole podcast, or read the news story I wrote about it.
I also wrote a blog post about how an academic publisher offered its authors and pretty much anyone else willing to to post favorable reviews on websites gift certificates worth $25. Not too lucrative, but it must have attracted some people before an indignant academic blew the whistle.
Finally, I filed a feature story a while back but will be finishing it up on a freelance basis, and will post about it separately whenever it appears in Nature. So in some ways the 3-month internship is not over. I’ll be completing the ApolloPlus40 Twitter project and my feature alongside my other freelance work. Still, now’s a good time to reflect on it: the internship was a great chance to see the inside of a media organization, to work closely with great journalists, and to learn new tricks to take my journalism career to the next level. Freelancing 2.0? Could be.
