The world is in an extraordinary state at the moment. The measures against COVID-19 not only affects our day-to-day interaction but also has consequences for the way we consume international stories, news and images. Photographers, journalists, writers and filmmakers around the world are being restricted because of the pandemic. Every Wednesday at 16:00h (CET) three guests will give an insight in their work, their own communities and surroundings. How can we keep being informed and hold a broad perspective?
Geert Mak
Journalist and historian Geert Mak was born in 1946. His father served as a Protestant clergyman in the Dutch province of Friesland; the family also lived for a time on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Mak started in Amsterdam as editor of a the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, worked for years at the foreign desk of the VPRO broadcasting company and as city-reporter of the NRC Handelsblad daily. As from 1992 he has dedicated himself increasingly to the writing of books. With ‘Jorwert, The Biography of a Village’, ‘Amsterdam, A Brief Life of the City’ and ‘The Century of my Father’ he became one of the most successful authors of the Netherlands. ‘In Europe’, his voyage through the continent and through the twentieth-century Europe, became also in the rest of Europe a classic. On behalf of the city of Amsterdam he held the ‘Wibaut Chair’ as extraordinary professor of urban issues at the University of Amsterdam. He was in 2008 awarded with the Leipziger Buchpreis für Europäischen Verständigung. His books are translated in more than twenty languages.
Cecilia Ferrara
Cecilia Ferrara is a freelance journalist, co-founder of the Investigative Reporting Project Italy and contributor of Radio Bullets. She graduated in European Contemporary History at the University of Florence. Ferrara started working as a journalist in the communitarian radio station Novaradio, in Florence, in the year 2000. She became an expert of Balkan politics, society and organised crimes, living in Sarajevo and Belgrade from 2007 to 2010. Ferrara freelances for several Italian and international media such as OCCRP, Médiapart, The Guardian, L’Espresso Online, Limes Online, Il Venerdì (La Repubblica), Osservatorio Balcani and Caucaso, Left, Avvenimenti, Europa. She is co-author of the book ‘Narconomics’ (2011) on the international traffic of cocaine and heroine. At the moment she works on transnational investigative journalism projects.
Gergo Saling
Gergo Saling is managing partner and senior editor of Direkt36, a non-profit center for experimenting with deep investigative journalism, storytelling and data visualization. For further information on Direkt36, launched in January 2015. He was previously editor-in-chief and longtime news director of Origo, the most popular Hungarian news and features website. Under his leadership the portal stood as a standard for nonpartisan and objective journalism, and the team was experimenting with different innovative ways of storytelling. He edited several award-winning investigative projects. For further information on Gergo’s controversial departure from Origo in June 2014. He holds a degree on History and Ethnology from ELTE Budapest University, graduating in 2002.
