Bio

I started writing professionally in 2006, covering Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, where I had just completed a semester on student exchange.

Six months later, after blogging (at australianinbeirut) and reporting for outlets including the Canberra Times and news.com.au, I returned to Australia and took up a position ith Alternative Media Group, writing for their three titles – City Hub, City News and The Bondi View. I was also news editor of the City News for a period.

After a brief stint at the North Western Courier in Narrabri, at the beginning of 2008 I returned to freelancing for outlets in Australia and abroad. I then travelled to Tehran where I covered Iran’s 2009 presidential elections for The Diplomat, Crikey.com CBS and Fox News.

After having my trip cut short by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance I returned to Beirut where I freelanced some more, working for outlets including, Today FM (Ireland), CBC,  Qantara, The Scotsman, Executive, Time Out Beirut and Newmatilda.com.

In April I returned to Australia, where I started contributing once more to The City Hub and on occasion The City News, as well as making videos for the#ElectionWIRE youtube channel.

In February of 2011 I moved to Cairo to report on the ongoing Arab Spring. So far being here has seen me do some more work for places like newmatilda.com, as well as new outlets like the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, Russia Today, New Humanist, King’s Tribune, and Citizen Radio. I’ve also started to dabble with photography.

I had quite a couple of years in Cairo including a protracted legal battle with the authorities, and meeting and marrying the incredible Aliya Alwi. In February of 2013 moved to Ecuador with her. Aa 2013 continued I built on the reporting and commentary I had been doing in Cairo, arguing that the real threat to Egypt’s revolution was not the Muslim Brotherhood but the military, who would use exaggerated criticisms of the elected Islamist government as cover for a bloody coup. When grim validation of this position, which was articulated only by a tiny minority of English speaking commentators, came in the form of massacres and mass arrests, simply saying “we told you so” did not feel sufficient (though it has never stopped feeling necessary).

Appalled by the capacity of disinformation to dominate over evidence based discussion, we teamed up with a bunch of other people to launch ImportantCool.com. You can still read the stuff I published there. But the real mission of IC was not just to fling more content into the internets gaping maw, but to develop a new journalistic methodology based around transparency of process and sources. The idea was to set a new standard of accountability and rigour that would help quality journalism stand out from fake and low quality content.

After struggling for years to achieve this using the existing tools, a core group of us decided that the way forward was to found a company to build new tools. Thus Stone was born. The core of the idea is to streamline the process by which journalists and others can capture, upload and share, their research work as video, as demonstrated here.

The software is now at the stage of a working demo which you can try yourself, and generating interest from outlets, universities and investors (email me at austin [at] writeinstone [dot] com if you want to know more).