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The NSA files and the network effect
The modern leak needs a new kind of reporting, and news organisations are adapting by finding collaborations of scale.
“The impact of the NSA files will reverberate for a generation. It has already forced a re-evaluation of the relationship between powerful technology and telephone companies, the government and the consumer. It has raised the issue of digital human rights and how to control a covert surveillance state. It has made the internet potentially unstable and untrustworthy.”
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WikiLeaks and the Espionage Act of 1917
Can Congress make it a crime for journalists to publish classified information? A thorough article by Emily Peterson on threats that face journalists and their industry for the use of classified documents published by whistleblowers.
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Tove Jansson: Love, war and the Moomins
This year Finland is celebrating the centenary of the birth of Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins, and one of the most successful children’s writers ever. Her life included war and lesbian relationships – both reflected by the Moomins in surprising ways.
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Lodestars in a Murky Media World
Margaret Sullivan is the fifth public editor appointed by The New York Times. In this op-ed, she asks:
“ARE today’s college-age journalists doomed, entering a business in free fall that is incapable of allowing most of them to earn a living? Or are they lucky, coming into a media world bursting with new possibilities?
And given the strange new territory, still largely unnavigated, are there any stars to steer by?”
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The Future of Internet Freedom
We have the technology to defeat censorship. But do we have the will?
“OVER the next decade, approximately five billion people will become connected to the Internet. The biggest increases will be in societies that, according to the human rights group Freedom House, are severely censored: places where clicking on an objectionable article can get your entire extended family thrown in prison, or worse.
The details aren’t pretty.”
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Covert Drone War
In this investigation, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracks CIA drone strikes and other US covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Browse through stories on operations, analysis of drone use, complete data sets and more.
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The 40 Best Blogs for Journalism Students
Because journalism as a whole constantly ebbs and flows along with the currents of new technologies, students hoping to graduate and enter into the industry need to understand how its myriad facets change over time. Seeing as how blogs — one of the cornerstones of digital media and citizen reporting — inherently boast a current, updated structure, they provide an ideal conduit through which to trace all the most timely trends, concerns, and opinions. No matter their specialty or area of interest, at least one of the following will provide some nourishing food for thought and effective supplements to classroom lesson.
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Covering global health with integrity
“With global health and human rights coverage increasingly funded by foundations that organize reporting trips, Western journalists who don’t understand the nuances of a place are parachuting in for a week, charged with covering some of the most complex and distressing aspects of human existence. These trips are invaluable resources, and global health reporting would simply not have the reach it does without them. But this setup also has many potential pitfalls that can prevent well-meaning reporters from accurately conveying the subtleties of their sources’ experience, and it’s our professional obligation to address them. Admitting our own fallibilities can be terrifying, but remaining alert and self-aware can help mitigate the problem.”
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FastCompany
FastCompany, a website with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, ethonomics (ethical economics), leadership, and design, lists the world’s top 10 most innovative companies in big data.
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Innovation, Optimism and Jobs
Is digital technology destroying middle-class jobs? Does it exacerbate income inequality? Does it boost economic growth and productivity — without creating the jobs that ought to come with economic growth?
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6 Powerful Communication Tips from Some of the World’s Best Interviewers
Writers, journalists and others who interview sources regularly have developed tried and true techniques that help them connect deeply with people.
Not only can interviews with thought leaders in your field provide a great source of content for your blog or website, the skills honed while interviewing are useful in many types of communication.
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29 Awesome Things About Google
What would the internet be without Google? Sure, there are other search engines out there, but the world’s biggest and arguably its best one serves up over one billion results out of Mountain View, Calif., every day to people in 146 countries.
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The Wrestler
“Covering entertainment means that you come across people whose faces you first saw 20-feet-tall on a movie screen. They tend to shrink when you meet them, but Mr. Hoffman was far from disappointing in person. He didn’t enjoy press even a tiny bit, but knew everyone had a job to do and mine, on occasion, was covering him during the awards season. And he was always available for a quote about a fellow actor or a project he was working. He was a professional, and a kind, decent guy to boot.”
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New media models disrupt traditional journalism
A slew of made-for-Web news sites are increasingly undermining the platform of print media. In this shifting landscape, how will journalism and storytelling survive, and what are readers to gain? Judy Woodruff talks to Re/code’s Walt Mossberg, VOX Media’s Jim Bankoff, and Tom Rosenstiel of the American Press Institute.
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Architect of Madness: Ferrari’s Héliographias
León Ferrari (1920-2013) was an Argentinian conceptual artist who worked with a series of extremely different medias through the years. Trained as an engineer, he gained notoriety in the 1960s thanks to his polemical works on religion and politics. Exiled in 1976 in Brazil, he started a series of plans using heliography, the technique traditionally employed by architects,until the advent of the computers, in order to reproduce their drawings. Combining letraset icons to hand sketches, he invented labyrintic worlds which became part of a series called “The architecture of Madness”.
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LOST
In this Internews published story, award-winning foreign correspondent Janine di Giovanni travelled to Lebanon where she found that one of the most urgent needs of refugees is information.
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Khaled Khalifeh’s cafe society: Damascus life ‘must go on’
“There is a table at the cafe which has the same customers every single day. They start with coffee and end up in the evening drinking locally-made arak and smoking the affordable Al Hamra cigarettes made in the coastal city of Latakia.
The four men at this table are almost the only ones left of the old customers in this cafe, which once bustled with Syrians from all walks of life. Music nights, poetry readings, exhibitions, gossip and cultural debate all took place over wine and dinner.”
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Road to Raqqa
“ON BOTH sides of the fragile border that divides Syria and Iraq runs Al-Hamad, the great Syrian desert, a large semi-arid plain. It runs from the outskirts of Baghdad through the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi into Syria, where it proceeds beneath the historical territory of the Kurds to the Syrian cities of Deir ez Zur and Raqqa. Across the desert, and along the Euphrates river, run pipelines that draw gas and oil from the depths to the cities that ring it. Otherwise the desert is quiet, and empty.”
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Not Losing the Arab Awakening
“Looking back to the “first” Arab Awakening, which began in the mid-19th century, can be illuminating. That awakening took the form of an intellectual revolution in which a wide array of Arab thinkers started questioning the control of distant Ottoman despots over their nations and criticizing their own limited contact with the outside world. Their calls for intellectual, economic, and political change laid the groundwork for a new Arab world, eventually resulting in a wave of independence struggles in the 1940s and 1950s.”
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Half a Billion Clicks Can’t be Wrong
“It is important to note two critical things about this ranking. The first is that it focuses on change in coverage of conflict, not the raw volume of that coverage itself. It is obviously not news that Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are all still undergoing intense conflict — the policymaking question is whether they are getting any better (at least in the eyes of the news media). Thus, Syria, which ranks No. 2 out of all countries in terms of total raw volume of conflict, actually had the greatest decrease in coverage of that conflict in 2013 (despite a major chemical weapons attack in August 2013) and thus is green in the map above. The second thing to keep in mind is that this ranking combines all forms of conflict, both domestic and foreign. France’s significant increase in conflict comes from a combination of domestic strife from increasing immigrant unrest, anti-Semitism, class wars, and societal fractionalization — but also its foreign military interventions in Africa, from Mali to Central African Republic.”
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This is Danny Pearl’s Final Story
“For the families of those who died on 9/11, the day marks the start of what’s likely to be a years-long trial for justice against KSM, the self-described architect of the World Trade Center attacks. For me, it’s something else. KSM is the man who bragged about taking a knife to the throat of my Wall Street Journal colleague and close friend Daniel Pearl.”
Asra Q. Nomani, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, teaches journalism at Georgetown and is a co-director of the Pearl Project.
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Tony Gallagher exits Telegraph
“On this week’s Media Talk, John Plunkett and guests discuss Tony Gallagher’s abrupt departure as editor of the Daily Telegraph, how the Mail on Sunday is closing in on the Sun on Sunday, and what exactly the BBC is up to with its Instagram video news project.”
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Glass, Darkly
“I HAD, IN THE BEGINNING, never heard of Google Glass, but that was part of the point. This was June, and Glass, as time-strapped “wearable computing” enthusiasts had quickly taken to calling it, had come to market just two months earlier, and then only in the most limited of limited releases. Just ten thousand had been made available, the first 2,000 sold to those fortunates who had attended Google’s 2012 I/O conference in San Francisco and witnessed the Glass demo, for which a series of hands-free-videotaping parachutists, stunt-bicyclists, and rappellers were employed to deliver the device to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who was already wearing one. Another 8,000 went to the winners of a Twitter contest, who described their “use case” (clearly a more specific term than mere use) for Glass under the hashtag #ifihadglass, and were rewarded with the $1,500 opportunity to buy one.”
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The Arab world into the unknown
In this piece, Peter Harling and Sarah Birke reflect on the state of the Arab world after a confounding 2013 that saw, for many, the dissipation of the enthusiasm of the 2011 uprisings. Harling is Senior MENA advisor at the International Crisis Group; Birke is a Middle East Correspondent for The Economist.
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The Egyptian Army’s Unlikely Allies
When the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany took the stage in October at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to promote the French translation of his latest novel, he was presumably not expecting to be heckled and chased from the venue by a crowd of his own countrymen. But minutes into his talk, the author’s voice was drowned out by the shouts of Egyptian emigrés who had come out for the chance to tear him to bits.
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