WEBCAST: Meet Sudarsan Raghavan, Baghdad bureau chief, Washington Post
As you know, we have been doing a series of webcasts to introduce the school to incoming students. Our latest was with Sudarsan Raghavan, Baghdad bureau chief, The Washington Post . The originial announcement is below, but you can listen to the recording here.
AUDIO WEBCAST: Sudarsan Raghavan, Baghdad bureau chief, The Washington Post (bio below)
Friday, May 9, 3-4 p.m. NY time
10 p.m. Baghdad time
See local time in your city here: http://snurl.com/28191
Listen live at the link below (or by dialing 646-915-9583) or listen to a recording: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ColumbiaJournalism/2008/05/09/MEET-AN-ALUM-Sudarsan-Raghavan
Columbia Journalism School invites you to meet an award-winning foreign correspondent. He has reported from more than 50 countries and nine war zones in Africa (where he was Knight-Ridder bureau chief), the Middle East, Asia, the former Soviet Union and Central America. Raghavan, who has won several major prizes, including the Polk Award, started his career in 1992 freelancing from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He will discuss the situation in Iraq, his career and what he learned at Columbia. He’ll be calling in from his Baghdad home. You can ask questions via the live chatroom or the listener line, or send them in advance via e-mail to dos[at]jrn.columbia.edu
Read some of his latest stories: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/sudarsan+raghavan/
On April 12, 2007, a couple of weeks after he spoke at Columbia during a brief vacation, he nearly became a victim of one of the countless Iraq bombs we hear about. Here’s how his front-page, first-person story, “In an Instant, a Junkyard of Humanity,” began:
The bomber blew himself up no more than a few yards away. First, a brilliant flash of orange light like a starburst, then a giant popping sound. A gust of debris, flesh and blood threw me from my chair as if I were made of cardboard.
I was lying on a bed of shattered glass on the floor of the cafeteria in the Iraqi parliament building, covered with ashes and dust. Small pieces of flesh clung to my bluejeans. Blood, someone else’s, speckled the left lens of my silver-rimmed glasses. Blood, mine, oozed from my left hand, punctured by a tiny shard of glass.
“Are you okay? Are you okay?” asked Saad al-Izzi, one of The Post’s Iraqi correspondents, standing over me, his face framed by an eerie yellowish glow, his voice distant. I did not reply.
I had always thought about this moment. In Iraq, every journalist does. But I did not expect a bomber to take lives inside the Green Zone, the nerve center of the Iraqi government and its backer, the United States.
Read the whole piece - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/12/AR2007041202455.html - and listen to a six-minute audio story by him - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2007/04/12/VI2007041201194.html
Huffington Post’s Eat the Press called the piece “a must-read”: “The pure narrative movement of the piece, full of sudden temporal jumps and shifts in voice, only serves to underscore the nervy panic of the moment and its aftermath as Raghavan struggles to render the disjointed scene into something whole.”
See the transcript of a WashingtonPost.com chat with him the next day:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/04/12/DI2007041201708.html
- - -
TODAY’S WEBCAST: Listen live at the link below (or by dialing 646-915-9583) or listen to a recording: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ColumbiaJournalism/2008/05/09/MEET-AN-ALUM-Sudarsan-Raghavan
Friday, May 9, 3-4 p.m. NY time
See local time in your city here: http://snurl.com/28191 You can ask Raghavan questions via the live chatroom, or send them in advance via e-mail to ss221@columbia.edu
- - - -
YOU CAN LISTEN TO ALL OUR PREVIOUS WEBCASTS AND SEE ALL OUR RESOURCES AND FAQS FOR NEW STUDENTS at http://deanstudents.blogsome.com/2008/04/18/prepping/
