🎧 #86 — Dalal Mawad (Associated Press)

Hello folks! Happy U.S. election day and welcome to another episode of Inside The Newsroom! Best of luck to everyone voting today, I’ll be following along every step and making a whole lot of charts along the way!

Before I do, I can’t wait to share my conversation with Dalal Mawad, senior producer and correspondent for the Associated Press, and perhaps the most accomplished guest at such a young age we’ve ever had on the podcast. I was also joined by Aina, my very first co-host, as we learned from Dalal what it was like living and reporting through the huge chemical explosion in August, and how the heck the country escapes its deep political and economic crises.

Be sure to check out last week’s episode with New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum, who took us inside what it was like to interview the Democratic presidential candidates last year, his views on news reporting vs opinion journalism, and what policies are needed to solve the harshest income inequalities highlighted by Covid-19… 👇

I’m still figuring out next week’s guest, so until then, enjoy this week’s… 🤓

Job Corner

We upped our game to add almost 200 new postings to the job board, taking our total to 900! Help us out be spreading the word!

Data Corner

* Refugees: Database on the world’s refugees, from the UN

* Protests: Global mass protest and conflict data, from ACLED

Who is Dalal Mawad?

Dalal was born and raised in Lebanon and has carefully observed everything that’s happened in her country over the past 15 years. She graduated with a bachelor’s in economics from the American University of Beirut, a master’s in international political economics from the London School of Economics, and a master’s in journalism from Columbia. Oh, she also happens to be fluent in English, Arabic, French and Spanish. I’m not jealous at all…

Dalal covers the entire Middle East and North Africa region, and has reported on several wars and other disasters in the past, including Syria’s civil war and Palestine’s humanitarian crisis. Before the AP, she reported for the UN, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times. She’s also the recent winner of the Samir Kassir Award, the MENA region's most prestigious journalism award, for her feature on Lebanon’s drag performers.

Dalal 👇

Blast Investigation Update

Tomorrow marks three months since one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, at a warehouse in the Port of Beirut that killed more than 200 people and ripped the city to shreds. Political interference and a seriously flawed judicial system mean we still don’t have answers on who was responsible. Calls for an independent international investigation were discarded as a waste of time by President Michel Aoun, making a credible and impartial domestic investigation seemingly impossible