Mohammed Jamjoom named Middle East Correspondent

CNN assigned another reporter to full-time duties covering the Middle East. Mohammed Jamjoom has been based in Atlanta (and doing rotations in Baghdad) but now will be based in the Abu Dhabi center.

A few of the stories he's reported on:

October 2009

Mohammed Jamjoom filed a report about medical clinics in Baghdad that are being run on solar power as a way to deal with the still-spotty supply of electricity in the city:

April 2009

In Saudi Arabia, women become even more disposable, with a court allowing divorce via text message. Mohammed Jamjoom reports:

The story of the 8-year-old Saudi girl who was married off by her male relatives has been in the news quite a bit lately and on Tuesday, International's Mohammed Jamjoom spoke to Wolf Blitzer about the legalities of the case:

Here is the CNN press release:

Saudi-born Jamjoom joins CNN’s roster of anchors and correspondents covering the Middle East and his remit includes reporting the day-to-day news from the United Arab Emirates, covering breaking news stories across the region where the network’s newsgathering needs require and continuing as part of the rotation of correspondents reporting for the network from Iraq.

“I’m delighted Mohammed is bolstering our growing team in the Middle East. This appointment signals CNN's continued commitment to the region and investment in our Middle East production hub based in Abu Dhabi which launched in November 2009. He brings additional experience to the region gained from reporting and producing major breaking news stories for CNN and previously in Saudi Arabia. He is a strong talent with an impressive track record and we're pleased viewers will get to know Mohammed much better as he becomes an integral part of our reporting from the region,“ says Parisa Khosravi, senior vice president of international newsgathering for CNN Worldwide.

Jamjoom was most recently based at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters where he was the assignment editor on the international news desk. While in Atlanta, Jamjoom also continued to work extensively on Middle East-based stories for CNN, both as a reporter and producer covering breaking news, politics, human rights and business in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In 2009 and 2010, Jamjoom also travelled to Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen to produce and report.

He takes up his position mid August.

Jamjoom began his career at CNN as a freelance reporter and producer while he was living in Saudi Arabia in late 2006. His first story for CNN International involved Iraqi conjoined twin girls who underwent successful separation surgery in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and he then worked with the CNN Hajj Coverage team that same year.

Jamjoom then joined CNN's International Desk in late 2007 and until July 2010 worked as a full time assignment editor. While in Atlanta, Jamjoom also continued to work extensively on Middle East-based stories for CNN, both as a reporter and producer covering breaking news, politics, human rights and business in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In 2009 and 2010, Jamjoom also travelled to Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen to produce and report.

In Iraq, Jamjoom reported on several aspects surrounding the country’s parliamentary election. In April 2010 he interviewed the family of the Iraqi journalist - Saeed Chmagh - killed in a 2007 attack by a US helicopter gunship in Iraq, after WikiLeaks posted a video showing that he was being rescued when the gunship’s crew fired on the van to which he was being carried. He has also worked on CNN’s Iran desk covering stories such as the case of the Iranian mother who was sentenced to be stoned to death after an adultery conviction.

He was part of the team nominated for the 2010 News and Documentary Emmy Awards for CNN's coverage of the story of the failed attempt to down the Northwest Airlines flight from Schipol in the Netherlands to Detroit in the US on 25th December 2009.

In January 2010, Jamjoom travelled to Yemen to produce a series of reports and set up an exclusive interview with Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The CNN team also filed stories on how Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab disappeared in Yemen for more than two months before he allegedly tried to bring down a Northwest Airlines jet with explosives concealed in his underwear, plus how al Qaeda is able to operate across large areas of Yemen.

In May 2010, CNN gained exclusive access to one of Baghdad’s two female juvenile prisons and Jamjoom became the first reporter for a Western television network to file a story from inside.

Prior to joining CNN, Jamjoom worked for Saudi Arabia’s English language Channel 2, where he worked as a co-anchor on its primetime news show; anchored the news-in-brief segments; co-hosted, the morning show 2U; and hosted, wrote and produced for several other programmes for the channel. He also freelance produced and coordinated for other journalists and outlets visiting the Kingdom.

Jamjoom was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He spent his childhood living between Saudi Arabia and the United States. He attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he studied journalism, cinema and history. He is fluent in both English and Arabic.

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Your Views on the News, August 6, 2010

Lots to read, digest and discuss in this article from the September issue of Vanity Fair.

The Gray Lady of Cable News
Many think Jon Klein, president of CNN/U.S., has lost the cable-news war to Fox. But CNN has racked up record profits by being bland.
Article for Vanity Fair by Michael Wolff•Illustration by John Cuneo

Jon Klein is an extremely affable broadcast-news executive, a chinos-and-Docksiders 52-year-old whom almost everybody in the TV-news business likes and believes is not only responsible for CNN’s ignominious ratings decline—it has lost in every prime-time slot for most of the last five years—but also for the collapse of broadcast journalism itself.

Among the inside-baseball television-news diaspora—network-news alums who have lost their jobs and been scattered as the television-news industry has been flattened—Klein and his stewardship of the network rise to a level not just of confounding mismanagement but of moral void in which the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. In this example of the existential crisis of modern life, not only is CNN being beaten year after year by Fox, but it’s precisely its well-intentioned earnestness that is responsible for the rise of ideological television.

“CNN’s inability to evolve has given the game to Fox and us,” says MSNBC president Phil Griffin.

Read more »

CNN Alum's Katrina Book

Kathleen Koch's new book, Rising From Katrina, is being released as we approach the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Baldwin County NOW. com recently posted this interview with the former CNN reporter.
In the memoir, Koch discusses growing up in Bay St. Louis, Miss.; explores how Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and neighboring coastal communities; and the way that shining a national spotlight on the plight of all coastal residents prevented anyone from becoming a mere footnote in the shadow of New Orleans.
“I didn’t want to write just another hurricane book,” Koch said during a recent phone interview from the Clarksville, Md. home she shares with her husband and two daughters. “I wanted people to see the bigger view. These became life and death decisions — whether to stay, whether to go. And the recovery is not a sprint. It’s a marathon.”







FAIRHOPE, Ala. — A reporter usually learns early in their career they should never become personally involved in a story. But if Kathleen Koch hadn’t made a conscious (and long-thought-out) decision to instead do that very thing, an entire community might have been forgotten in the aftermath of one of this nation’s worst natural disasters.


Former CNN White House correspondent Kathleen Koch stands amidst the rubble in Bay St. Louis, Miss., not long after Hurricane Katrina nearly wiped the town off the map. Her new book, “Rising From Katrina: How My Mississippi Hometown Lost It All And Found What Mattered,” is a lesson about how the human spirit can overcome adversity, even when there seems to be little hope left. Photo by Skip Nocciolo/CNN.




The former CNN correspondent will be at Page & Palette, 32 S. Section St. in Fairhope, on Aug. 4, from 6-8 p.m., to sign copies of “Rising From Katrina: How My Mississippi Hometown Lost It All And Found What Mattered.”

In the memoir, Koch discusses growing up in Bay St. Louis, Miss.; explores how Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and neighboring coastal communities; and the way that shining a national spotlight on the plight of all coastal residents prevented anyone from becoming a mere footnote in the shadow of New Orleans.

“I didn’t want to write just another hurricane book,” Koch said during a recent phone interview from the Clarksville, Md. home she shares with her husband and two daughters. “I wanted people to see the bigger view. These became life and death decisions — whether to stay, whether to go. And the recovery is not a sprint. It’s a marathon.”

Koch said the story’s framework first centers on her family moving to Bay St. Louis when she was a teen, and how Hurricane Camille (1969) was at the time the benchmark storm to which future events were compared. As residents from Louisiana to Alabama soon discovered, Katrina’s bite would turn out to be much worse than her bark.

In fact, the physical and emotional scars left by the 2005 storm have not yet faded for many residents there, and those profiled in Koch’s book are not unlike our own neighbors — hardworking men and women, some of whom are still struggling to put the experience behind them.

Although there are dramatic accounts in the book about people struggling to survive as the storm’s wind and waves batter the Gulf Coast, Koch uses them sparingly, choosing to focus on how disasters can bring folks together for the common good.

“I write as a journalist does, about the people with the most compelling stories,” she said. “By telling a story (about people clinging to trees) 10 times, however, the dramatic can become mundane. It’s about people sharing their emotions and thoughts.”

The 24-hour television news cycle, along with the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality, can often result in such human drama being swept under the rug. Koch said CNN management was very generous though in giving her permission, time and the resources needed to file reports from the Mississippi coast not once, but several times as the weeks and months passed.

She said, “John Klein was the president of CNN at the time. He saw my report. He saw the emotion. He saw how intensely personal it was. He saw that here was someone who could tell the story.”

The network’s coverage of Katrina’s impact earned a George Foster Peabody Award, as Koch anchored several special documentaries that updated the progress made in the years following the storm.

She credits local elected leaders and residents with knowing what needed to be done and acting quickly to accomplish it, even as the Federal Emergency Management Agency sat on the sidelines, mired in bureaucratic snafus.

“On the Mississippi coast, they choose their politicians well,” Koch said. “They would give anything for the town, the place, the people there — to bring it all back the way it was. It’s so heroic.”

The book relates the generosity shown by strangers from across the country who saw the CNN reports, of minor miracles and how the region rolled up its sleeves and rebuilt. It is also the story of this veteran reporter who, struggling to maintain her objectivity amid loss, traveled her own personal path from devastation to recovery.

“Kathleen Koch’s efforts in the national media ensured the Mississippi Gulf Coast was not forgotten,” stated football great and Mississippi native Brett Favre. “Time and time again, she reiterated the message that Katrina came ashore where we both grew up in Hancock County ... We will always be thankful to all the volunteers that gave of their time and resources to help. The random acts of kindness you will hear about in the book can’t help but renew your faith and humble you at the same time. Kathleen captures the challenges, victories and can-do attitude the people of the Mississippi coast exhibited after this horrible disaster. It is a great read.”

Noted author Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University history professor and longtime Bay St. Louis resident whose home along the Jordan River was destroyed by Katrina, stated, “A first-rate reporter, Koch got all the harrowing details exactly right: death-rattle winds, raging storm tide, flying metal debris and the god-awful feeling of rank abandonment.”

Koch became the de facto spokesperson for all Gulf Coast residents who felt they were abandoned, not only by the federal government, but also by the media in its rush to cover New Orleans. She is now a freelance journalist, having been laid off from CNN when a poor economy forced cutbacks across the board within several news organizations.

She said of her former employer, “They understand (the Gulf Coast) is a special place. Even though I’m not there, they’re carrying the banner forward.”

Koch returned to Bay St. Louis in May to celebrate her brother’s birthday. She saw a completed beach highway and some new construction, including the rebuilding of Trapani’s Eatery, a restaurant which had occupied the building that once housed her family’s Sunshine Ice Cream Parlor. Trapani’s was destroyed when Katrina roared ashore, and was temporarily reopened farther inland.

“I hope people understand it’s not just a Katrina book — a hurricane book. It’s about people, their emotions, coming to terms and finding the silver lining,” Koch said.

Can the book’s message be applied to how we deal with the oil spill crisis currently facing the Gulf Coast?

“Yes. Don’t give up. Don’t quit, no matter how bad things are,” she added. “You can get your life back on track. If you stick with it, you can come back. This whole region made it.”

A portion of the proceeds from each book sold will be donated to Pneuma Winds of Hope and LESM Coast Recovery Camps, two nonprofit groups still working on the Katrina recovery effort in Bay St. Louis.

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Ratings For The Week Of July 26th And The Month of July

Ratings For The Week of July 26th

1 - Based on four nights of regular programming

Click here for more information on the month's averages.

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Larry King's Tie

This isn't a new article, but this story about a well traveled tie & a charity auction recently caught my eye. The auction mentioned in the article was for the food bank of Greater Vancouver. The items being auctioned were ties signed or decorated by celebrities.

[Howard Isman] said getting the ties required a mix of ingenuity, luck and a lot of hard work.

"We get them various ways: some are easy to get, some are difficult to get," he said.

"We pursue them through agents, managers, any way we can ... until we finally find somebody who knows somebody who gets them for us."

Some ties arrive in New Westminster with miles under their belt and a great back-story.

"Last year we were trying to get Larry King from CNN. We sent a tie to his headquarters in Atlanta. We got an e-mail back saying, 'Sorry, Mr. King is not here he's gone to Los Angeles and we are going to forward the tie to LA,' " Isman said.

The tie was sent on but arrived in Los Angeles after King had left for New York. It was then forward to New York where, again, it missed King who had returned to his head office in Atlanta.

"Well, the tie never got to him but he did find out about it from someone in his office. So he sent us his own tie and it got to us a week before bidding closed," Isman said.

"And we had two people very hot for it and we got $300 for his tie."

Source: Delta Optimist, November 05, 2008

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Jeffrey Toobin: The Oath

Jeffrey Toobin, who examined the inner workings of the U.S. Supreme Court in his best seller "The Nine," probes the court under the Obama administration in his new book.

William Thomas, senior vice president, publisher and editor in chief at Doubleday, announced Monday that Toobin's "The Oath: The Secret Struggle for the Supreme Court," will be published in 2012.

"The battle between a conservative court and a liberal president will be one of the central behind-the-scenes dramas of the Obama years," said Toobin, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a senior analyst for CNN.

"The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court" remained on The New York Times list of best sellers for more than four months.

Source: Associated Press via Yahoo News

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CNN Distinguished Civil Rights Advocate Award

CNN and the Honorable Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Bernette Johnson to Receive Lawyers' Committee's Distinguished Civil Rights Advocate Award

The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law will bestow upon CNN and the Honorable Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Bernette Johnson its Distinguished Civil Rights Advocate Award at a reception hosted in conjunction with the National Bar Association´s 85th Annual Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana. During the event, hosted at the Marriott New Orleans on Wednesday, August 11, 2010, 4 - 6 p.m., CNN and Justice Johnson will be recognized for stellar civil rights achievements and efforts to champion the cause of equal justice.

"We are delighted to honor CNN and Soledad O'Brien, who will formally accept the award, for their outstanding commitment to coverage of minority and underserved communities," said Lawyers' Committee Executive Director Barbara Arnwine. "Ms. O'Brien's groundbreaking "Black in America" and "Latino in America" series were remarkable. Also, as the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, it is an added privilege to recognize CNN's unwavering and excellent coverage of the Gulf Coast during and following the most devastating natural disaster in U.S. history, which continues to adversely affect minority and low-income communities."

Said O'Brien, "I am delighted to be accepting the Distinguished Civil Rights Advocate Award on behalf of CNN. We work hard to live up to our diversity mission "We Are What We Air" always seeking to bring all voices to the forefront in our reporting. We are pleased to be recognized by the Lawyers' Committee for our role in shedding light on people and communities impacted by the important civil rights issues of our day."

Source: July 21, 2010 Press Release

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