Yusuf Omar: Telling untold stories through Mobile Journalism

On August 29, K2.0 will bring Yusuf Omar to Prishtina for our next Volume UP event.

For almost a decade, the multi-award winning journalist has been using his smartphone to report on big stories from around the world, including the war in Syria. He has been senior social reporter at CNN International (UK), mobile editor at the Hindustan Times (India) and a foreign correspondent at eNCA (South Africa).

Now, Omar is editorial and tech lead at Hashtag Our Stories, a global network of mobile storytellers that was recently invested in by Snapchat and that is promoting ‘MOJO’ (mobile journalism) around the world. 

But what exactly does Mobile Journalism (MOJO) entail? According to Omar, it means to shoot, edit, and produce an entire news story on your smartphone. MOJO has helped him travel to different places, sometimes to destinations that were unknown to him, and reach stories that would’ve been untold in the mainstream media. In a 2017 TEDx Talk, he said that documenting newsworthy stories, events and phenomena with our smartphones is our generation’s way of communicating with the world. 

Omar shows how journalism can be innovative, personal and intimate all at the same time and believes it’s an entirely new style that we can all learn from and use in our day-to-day lives, even if we’re not professional journalists. We can get engaged in documenting our own communities, and making sure that we are being heard.

Join us at his public talk on August 29 from 18:00, and at his mobile storytelling masterclass on August 30, 2019, from 10:00-14:00, at Hub 2.0. 

In order to participate in the masterclass, please register here. K

*Translation will be available in English/Albanian.

This grant is funded by the project ‘Luxembourg support for Civil Society in Kosovo’, financed by the Government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and managed by Kosovar Civil Society Foundation (KCSF).