2013 Round-Up
published 142 articles over 2013. Our Facebook fan page grew by over 4,000. Our Twitter feed, the most probing, interactive and engaging of any media related Twitter account in Sri Lanka, grew…
Media and Communications
Looking Back at Six Decades of Lankan Journalism: What went wrong?
Edwin Ariyadasa, who completed 91 years on 3 December 2013, is one of two grand old men of Lankan journalism still practising their craft (the other being D F Kariyakarawana, also 91)….
Twitter archive of @groundviews: November 2013
Every single one of well over 27,700 tweets by as @groundviews can be downloaded as a ZIP file from here. The archive, generated by Twitter, is fully searchable and can be browsed offline. All the tweets can…
Message to Commonwealth leaders: Stand up for Sri Lanka’s media
Photo courtesy Editors note: Earlier this year, I was asked to give a presentation on the post-war media landscape in Sri Lanka at the 20th World Editors Forum in Bangkok, Thailand. When…
The Al Jazeera interview with Mahinda Rajapaksa: Calling the bluff
The President’s recent and wide-ranging interview on Al Jazeera is interesting on a number of counts (download the episode in HD here). For starters, our President is clearly grossly uninformed or deliberately…
Launch of De Zoysa-Sivanayagam 2014 Fellowship in Global Journalism
Image courtesy Simon Fraser University On September 21, 2013, Sri Lankans Without Borders in partnership with launched the De Zoysa-Sivanayagam 2014 Fellowship in Digital Journalism. As noted on SLWB’s website, Lasantha Wickrematunge…
Lasantha Wickrematunge Memorial Lecture 2013: Presentations, photos and video
The Lasantha Wickrematunge Memorial Lecture held recently featured, as noted on the website of Sri Lankans Without Borders (SLWB) website, “…leading journalists from Canada and Sri Lanka [in] a panel discussion to…
Complete archive of #AskMR Twitter Q&A session
In what would have been an unprecedented engagement with Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa during his visit to the UN in New York (on-going at the time of writing), the President’s media…
30 Years Ago: Audio recordings of panel discussions
Photograph by Tehani Ariyaratne, from 30 Years Ago To complement the launch of 30 Years Ago and focus on some of the issues the project is anchored to and inspired by, four panel discussions…
Media monitoring of Navi Pillay’s visit to Sri Lanka
Photograph courtesy UN Sri Lanka At the invitation of the Sri Lankan Government, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay visited Sri Lanka at the end of August in what was,…
Announcing the De Zoysa-Sivanayagam 2014 Fellowship in Digital Journalism
On September 21, 2013, Sri Lankans Without Borders in partnership with will announce the launch of the De Zoysa-Sivanayagam 2014 Fellowship in Digital Journalism. As noted on SLWB’s website, Lasantha Wickrematunge led…
Sri Lankan exiles and emigrants: Some thoughts
Still from the movie Silenced Voices (Cavafy. Translated from the Greek) By way of a preface, I mention the perception in some religions that we all are exiles, sojourning through a foreign…
Citizen Journalism and the Numbers Game
Image courtesy Kath Noble recently published two articles in The Island, which were reproduced on Colombo Telegraph. [i] Bring on the Usual Suspects Some of the reactions to what Ms Noble wrote…
Sri Lankan diplunacy: Stray dogs, pricks, tigresses and CHOGM 2013
Photo courtesy Transcurrents / by Tony Ashby, AFP Bandula Jayasekara (@bundeljayse) is currently one of Sri Lanka’s highest-ranking diplomats, as Consul General in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia and former Consul…
The media as it is and should be: In conversation with Kunda Dixit
Kunda Dixit (@kundadixit), Publisher and Chief Editor of Nepali Times was in Sri Lanka recently, where we caught up for a brief conversation on the issues related to journalism in South Asia…