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 Khalid
Kazziha, class of 1993, was featured in the most recent issue, a focus on global
journalism, of the Adham Center's online journal Transnational Broadcasting Studies.
Kazziha, based in Nairobi as APTN senior producer for East/Central and West Africa,
and his colleague Nadia Bilbasy, Africa correspondent for MBC, gave TBS readers
an in-depth look at some of the newest technology field reporters are using to
cover breaking news in remote areas.
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APTN and other agencies now use a piece of equipment called
a TOKO box, which compresses video and audio signals so they can be fed to an
Inmarsat B satellite phone and transmitted via an ISDN line to another location,
where the signals are decompressed and put into Beta or other format. Kazziha
discussed the downside of this technology, such as reduced quality and high cost,
but said that this very portable equipment allows his team to cover breaking news
they might otherwise have missed.
"You're looking at governments that are facing a disaster,
in the middle of a transition or a coup d'etat--but organizations are required
to have a license to transmit. The flyaway sateliites could be just sitting around
in customs. But people still need to get the news out, today. We're able to bring
in this very simple equipment, which is compact and easy to deploy."
Kazziha and Bilbasy gave the example of a story they worked
on together, a school dormitory fire that happened about 70 kilometers outside
of Nairobi. Rather than going to the location, shooting footage, returning to
Nairobi to edit, and feeding stories via the Kenyan Broadcast Corporation, they
used the TOKO, and fed their pictures from the parking lot right outside the school.
"Meanwhile," said Kazziha, "the competition
had to send the material back to Nairobi and get a satellite booking if they're
lucky. But we're getting the pictures out right from the spot. Half an hour after
we filmed, the pictures were in London and being distributed worldwide."
The full interview
is available in TBS.
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