Photo Editing Israel’s Online Image

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"A simple search for “Israel” on Google Maps will give you more than just roadways and town names: photographed piles of Gazan rubble will pop out of the map, taking precedent over images of Israel’s popular landmarks and landscapes.

Google can’t control which images appear because the content is entirely user-generated — also called “open-source” — meaning that Web surfers can add or delete content as they please. And on many such open-source sites right now, including Wikipedia and Flickr, Israel’s image is far from favorable.

But David Saranga, the media consul for the Consulate General of Israel in New York, plans to fight back. After launching a pro-Israel campaign through Twitter.com during the Gaza war and by bringing Maxim magazine into Israel last year, he says he is recruiting the best in the business to revamp Israel’s online image.

In just a few weeks, he will bring six American new media experts to photograph Israel, with funds from the Consulate and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rather than selecting people based on their photography expertise, Saranga said that he is choosing his team members based on their proficiency editing blogs and open-source media.

After guiding the group members together for the first part of the week, he will send each person to a different part of the country — not to touristy destinations like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but instead to less trodden places like the fertile farms of the Galilee, villages in the Negev or small ancient cities like Caesaria. While participants are free to take photos of whatever they choose, Saranga hopes that they will document the “real” Israel — environmental advances, high-tech innovation, Israeli culture — instead of war. The bloggers will then upload their photo collections to various open-source sites, where young people will ideally access and repost the photos free of charge."

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[Howardx]

1. there are no paid shills for israel here though

no thats crazy talk.

[Tarc]

2. Here's a better way to avoid having "piles of Gazan rubble" show up in the pics

Stop.

Bombing.

Gaza.

[LeftishBrit]

3. For once, I agree with you.

[azurnoir]

4. Hopefully there will be some pictures of the

lovely new apartments I hear Israel will be building in its "eastern territory"

[Jefferson23]

5. lol, don't count on it.

[Idealism]

6. Like the Wizard of Oz

"Don't look behind that curtain!"

[Scurrilous]

7. The War Online

<snip>

"The collapse of the Israeli Left may be the latest casualty of last month's war in Gaza. The fighting appears to have scuttled what remains of the Israeli-Arab peace process, as a nationalist bloc of parties opposing territorial compromise with the Palestinians now occupies the majority of Israel's parliament. The right-wing Likud party will lead the governing coalition, to which they have pledged to invite parties that openly traffic in anti-Arab rhetoric.

Shadowing the animosity on the ground, partisans continue to trade salvos on the wireless frontiers of battle. Yet alongside the digitally reinforced hostilities, traces of common interest are breaking through Arab and Israeli new media. On YouTube, blogs, and social networking sites, the extreme terms of the ongoing violence are at once documented, exchanged, and translated for each side in turn. In this medium at least, Arabs and Israelis are way ahead of their political representatives.

Covering the War

At first glance, the internet's Israeli-Arab border resembles a combat zone, a place for explosive blogs and talkbacks along polemic lines, Zionist and anti-Zionist hacking, and partisan camps promoting their accounts of the "facts." During the war in Gaza, the Israeli Foreign Ministry and al Jazeera, among others, updated popular profiles on the micro-blogging site Twitter with talking points and links to like-minded video clips. Facebook groups mushroomed around every conceivable political statement, with users "donating" their personal status bar to applications that alternatively counted the number of Qassam rockets launched by Hamas or the number of civilians killed by Israel.

During the first week of airstrikes, Israel barred reporters from entering the Gaza Strip, making news outlets worldwide dependent on videos taken by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). With convenient labels in English denoting Hamas militants and rockets, Israel posted this footage on YouTube, where hundreds of thousands of users not only witnessed images of combat but also Israel's efforts to define the facts of its conflict and influence their interpretation.

Until the mid-January ceasefire, Western reporters only saw Gaza when embedded with IDF ground troops. News services scoffed at these restrictions, which contravened an Israeli Supreme Court ruling. Meanwhile, al Jazeera and al Aqsa, Hamas' satellite channel, were among the few outlets capable of broadcasting direct from Gaza. Their footage of corpses, overcrowded hospitals, and destroyed property fed accusations from Israel-supporters, who charged the Arab media with incitement.

Al Jazeera benefited most from the large audience drawn from Twitter links and Facebook groups. The Qatar-based network reported a 600% hike in hits from its online video stream during the fighting. Al Jazeera's English station, while unavailable to most cable subscribers in the U.S., drew significantly more viewers through the internet: in January, visitors to YouTube watched more clips from al Jazeera English than from any other English news station."

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[Violet_Crumble]

8. I couldn't find the article...the link just led to the homepage...

I'm embarressed to admit that I'm one of those folk who actually read an article when it's posted, but can anyone help me out with a link that leads to the article? I went searching on the site and couldn't find it, so I'm wondering if it's been removed or something...

[Scurrilous]

9. Try this Violet:

http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c36_a15107/News/New_York.html

:thumbsup: