Times I love my job: we just launched Enab Baladi’s edition on Google Play Newsstand; with our translation feature, everyone can read their reporting from within Syria.
What is Enab Baladi (عنب بلدي)?
From Sites of Conscience: “Enab Baladi is a nonprofit media organization that works to present quality independent journalism about the Syrian Revolution and the Syrian People.”
From an article on Elle.com: “Amid the rubble of Syria, a band of women are risking prison, or worse, to report, write, and edit the civil war’s paper of record.”
“Waleed and a circle of 20-odd friends who’d met during the protests had started an underground newspaper to help inform Syrians, and anyone else who wanted to know, about the government’s atrocities. They swore one another to secrecy, wrote under pseudonyms, and filed stories on Facebook (many Syrians now get their news from the social media platform; Enab Baladi’s Facebook page has 333,000 likes), using software to mask their computers’ IP addresses. These days the paper has a website that gets 200,000 hits a month, but in the beginning it had to be hand delivered, at night. Women were couriers, as they were less likely than men to be stopped and searched.”
“"To be a journalist in Syria is one of the most dangerous professions in the world,“ says Sherif Mansour of the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists, himself a reader of Enab Baladi. Of the 24 founding staff members, three top editors have been killed in separate attacks. Eight reporters have been detained and tortured, and 12 have fled the country.”
To read Enab Baladi on Google Play:
1. Go to this page in the Google Play store and click “Add”.
2. Open the Google Newsstand app on your Android or iOS phone or tablet and click the three horizontal lines in the upper left to open the menu; select My Library.
3. Scroll to the end of your library and click on the Enab Baladi edition.
4. Click the three dots in the upper right to pull up the settings menu, then select Translate.
5. You should get a prompt to translate to English; click Translate again. The edition will then appear in English.
It may not be perfect, but it’ll get you citizen journalism straight from a war zone.