A Newport Beach man and another Occupy movement member out of San Francisco are being credited by The Guardian and sites like Gawker with entering Syria on three occasions to capture 10 to 15 hours
of footage about life there. Geoffrey Shivley, who spent most of his
adult life working in computer security, provided online support for Occupy last year and is now a Telecomix news service “hacktivist.”
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To be sure, I've been called the same, without the “tivist.”
In a story about livestreamers amid the chaos, The Guardian reports Shively and William Gagan, working through the Turkish border town of Guvecci, obtained two
interviews from a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey, footage of a
pro-Assad rally in the president's Turkish hometown and a recorded plea from Syrian freedom fighters for arms and foreign intervention.
But Gawker's Danny Gold ripped Gagan not only for saying things like, “I was going to get some truths out of the trip” that discounted the news others reported, but for admitting that he did not feel the need to bone up on Syria before the trip. Gagan is also blasted for seeming to point more to his truth-collecting than the plight of Syrians.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.