Thursday, November 12, 2015

Guardian Cities

Interesting afternoon with the Guardian Cities team on the rooftop of the Laboratorio para la Ciudad. They're running a week of events, live blogs, streaming and so on around the city unearthing all sorts of issues, from local community activists to what it takes to be a journalist, and from serious to light-hearted.
Guardian Cities is a separate entity from The Guardian newspaper. It's on-line only and is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which gives them a certain free reign and, above all, time. This time last year it was Mumbai, now it's Mexico City's turn. 
So, in town we have Mike Herd and Francesca Perry (Guardian Cities), Ben Hicks (The Guardian Foundation), Martin Hodgson (International Editor of The Guardian U.S.) and Jonathan Watts, their Latin American correspondent.
I knew Jonathan from my Tokyo days when he was freelancing for some Japanese newspapers and we played football together. He then moved to Beijing (where he focussed on environmental issues and wrote a book, When a Billion Chinese Jump) but somehow we failed to re-connect and now he's in Latin America, although based in Rio. It's like I've been following him around. Anyway, nice to bump into him again.
It's interesting how internationally influential The Guardian has become and, like the BBC, a media outlet most people feel they can trust pretty implicitly. It's actually quite a brand now. So much so that its lower case "g" is almost as recognisable as Google's upper case one.


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