Everyday stories in extraordinary circumstances
For one Queensland town, ‘hyperlocal’ news means reporting from Damascus.
Life in a rural village in war-torn Syria plays out far away from the suburbs of Logan, a satellite city in the southeastern corner of Queensland, Australia.
But a young Queensland journalist is trying to bring these two worlds, and their cultures, a little bit closer together.
From Logan, Daniel Seed wants to bring “new life” to small villages on the outskirts of Damascus by creating podcasts in both English and Arabic that tell the story of life in these divergent worlds.
“The podcasts hold the concept of ‘embeddedness’ in the community,” he said at Storyology in Brisbane, using a term that paints a picture of a journalist living almost ‘within’ their story, while still being apart from it.
“For a journalist, time spent doing nothing in these communities is never time wasted.”

Though still a work in progress, the podcasts form part of a broader media project Seed has launched called Stringer Press, which has been shortlisted for a 2017 Walkley Foundation Innovation Grant.
It is an independent, not-for-profit, hyperlocal media outlet for Logan, a community that boasts a higher rate of multicultural diversity than the Queensland average.
“The project is aimed at developing traditional journalism techniques to better serve the needs of culturally and linguistically (diverse) social groups,” Seed said.
That includes reaching out to groups geographically far away that had relevance to the Logan community, such as those Seed hoped to connect with in Syria.
He said a photography exhibition featuring photos taken from a photojournalist’s journey through Syria was also in the works.
Titled “My unremarkable Syria”, Seed hopes this exhibition will further connect these two communities through journalism and art.

