Bob Maier
The front room of Bob Maier’s Walnut Street home may not look the part, but it’s on the
front lines of the fight for free speech and information half a world away, in Afghanistan. From here, Mr. Maier helps edit an independent news blog called KabulPress.org, which publishes news and commentary about what’s going on in the conflict-torn country.
Mr. Maier spends about 8 hours a week on layout and editing for the Afghan Website’s English pages. KabulPress.org also publishes news and commentaries in Dari, the native language of most Afghans. Mr. Maier is a longtime writer-producer with his own video production company and currently teaches and oversees the Broadcast Program at Gaston College.
His efforts help make information available to English speakers in Afghanistan as well as in the U.S. and Europe who are monitoring the situation.
“It has a political angle. It promotes free speech and discourse in Afghanistan. It’s really the only site that’s doing that,” Mr. Maier said.
Most news sites in or aimed at Afghanistan don’t allow commentary, he said. Both Britain’s BBC and the U.S. government-run Voice of America provide news via their websites and broadcast services, but they don’t provide a Web-based forum the way KabulPress.org does, he said.
“They have reporters on the ground who do a pretty good job, but the reality is the people there don’t trust them. They trust KabulPress because (it has) native journalists,” Mr. Maier said.
The website was founded about five years ago by Kamran Mir Hazar, an outspoken Afghan journalist. Mr. Maier, who has spent time in Afghanistan in recent years, was introduced to Mr. Mir Hazar by mutual friends, and got involved. Today, he produces the site’s English pages with Mr. Mir Hazar and a Canadian named Marc Seltzer.
Mr. Maier is the volunteer English-pages editor and U.S. consultant for KabulPress.org. He edits translated articles from the Dari-language side of the site and other sources. And he publishes interviews with Afghan journalists who speak English.
He said the news and commentary delve deeply into Afghan politics. “It specializes in exposing government corruption. We have a lot of whistleblowers,” Mr. Maier said.
Recent headlines have included a report on Afghan consular officials in Pakistan allegedly selling passports to terrorists, a petition and discussions about the detention of a local journalist and Afghan elections. Another commentary said, “We want a law, but democratic one.”
The English side’s traffic is limited. It gets about 6,000 page views per month, compared to 400,000 for the Dari side.
Mr. Maier and his colleagues would like to do more. They’re looking for money to add reporters and translators and to keep the site running over the long term. The site is loosely organized at the moment. Mr. Maier thinks it might eventually work as a nonprofit organization, if he and his colleagues can find funding.
See previous features in our occasional “Blogs & Bloggers” series at http://davidsonnews.net/category/davidson-blogs/. Have an idea for a future blog feature? Send it to editor@davidsonnews.net.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE
April 29, 2008, “Watching Kabul from Davidson.”
Greetings from Oslo, Norway. I’m traveling here and in Sweden meeting with Afghan journalists and others who have been granted political asylum in Europe. The immigration of people from the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia into Europe over the past twenty years is a fascinating story. As their numbers grow, it mirrors the U.S. integration and social justice issues I lived through in the 1960s and 70s. I’m amazed listening to eight- year old very Asian-looking Afghan kids speaking to me first in perfect sing-songy Norwegian, then shifting to a polished British-accented English when they hear I’m American, then answering their parents in their native Dari. This is integration on a multi-cultural global scale that will change the world– I think in a positive way. I’m making daily notes on my travels on facebook. If you want to be a friend there, I’m the Robert Maier from Charlotte. Happy trails!