AGR welcomes Walid Batrawi

AGR’s editorial collective has a long wish-list for the paper; improved coverage (along, of course, with adequate funding and increased distribution) always hovers at the top of the list, and to this end we’ve discussed cultivating a crew of foreign reporters in global hot-spots. We are very excited to announce that Walid Batrawi, a Palestinian journalist, will be covering news from the Middle East. His first story for us – on Israel’s “separation wall” – can be read on page seven.
Walid was born in Jerusalem in 1969. His father was editor-in-chief of the Palestinian daily Al-Fair (The Dawn) in the 1970s. When the 1991 Gulf War began, Walid worked with foreign media crews as an Arabic, English, Russian, and Hebrew translator. He later worked as a freelance producer with a number of foreign media outlets in Jerusalem, including the BBC and CBC. From 1994 to 2000 he worked as a producer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC); he obtained his Masters degree in Mass Communication from Leicester University in the UK in 2001.
Walid lives with his wife, Benaz Somiry, a freelance consultant on Media and Gender, and daughter Tamar in Ramallah.
He first heard of the AGR via a story we ran on Palestinian journalists in issue #267 (“Palestinian media caught in internal crossfire”) which mentioned him. As he wrote to us in an initial email: “Getting alternative stories in the Middle East and reporting from a progressive, human rights angle is an uneasy mission. Here in Palestine and Israel one risks his life to get a good story.” We are, of course, grateful for his work.