Results matching “journalists die in iraq”

Jonathan Dube, of Poynter Online, recently interviewed Arianna Huffington, the co-founder of HuffingtonPost.com, a site that had 4.7 million unique visitors in May, a 255 percent increase from a year earlier, according to Nielsen Online. The site is now expanding to include local editions, starting with Chicago.

In the interview, Huffington discusses the site's biggest mistake, how HuffPo does things differently and what she sees as the future of journalism.

"A lot of the discontent with traditional journalism is because too many reporters have forgotten that the highest calling of journalists is to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned... Too many journalists... are obsessed with a false view of 'balance' and 'objectivity'" said Huffington. "The misguided notion that every story has two sides. And that the truth is supposed to be found somewhere in the middle. But not every story has two sides and the truth is often found on one side or the other. The earth is not flat. Evolution is a fact. Global warming is a fact. And there are definitely not two sides to the proposition that Iraq is our generation's greatest foreign policy disaster. It is. Period."

As for what's next for journalism? "I believe in a hybrid journalistic future where traditional newspapers adopt the best elements of online journalism, and new media sites continue to do more and more of the kinds of investigative reporting usually associated only with traditional media outlets," said Huffington.

Source: Poynter

After Zoriah Miller was "disembedded" from his Marine unit in Iraq, following the publication of graphic photos of a suicide bombing, the New York Times questions "what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war."

Miller, in fact, was surprised by the attention the image received, noting that his were not photographs of exceptional circumstances. They were, "photographs of something that happens every day all across the country." Miller continued, "the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working."
 
"If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists -- too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts -- the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme," notes NYT. "After five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers."

By a recent count, just six Western photographers are covering the war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged.

When the War in Iraq reached its fifth anniversary in March - it didn't make the front page in many American papers. The decreased coverage, of course, is in response to a range of issues - a public weary of the war, costs of maintaining foreign bureaus for economically ailing papers, journalists' safety - but increasingly, embed restrictions - or retribution even against photographs abiding by the rules - is an issue.

According to NYT, "New embed rules were adopted in the spring of 2007 that required written permission from wounded soldiers before their image could be used, a near impossibility in the case of badly wounded soldiers... While embed restrictions do permit photographs of dead soldiers... in practice, photographers say, the military has exacted retribution on the rare occasions that such images have appeared. In four out of five cases that The New York Times was able to document, the photographer was immediately kicked out of his or her embed following publication of such photos."

Further, in many cases, the military has simply restricted access to combat. When Franco Pagetti tried to cover heavy figting in Baghdad's Sadr City in April 2008, "The commander there refused to let me in... He said it was unsafe. I know it's unsafe, there's a war going on. It was unsafe when I got to Iraq in 2003, but the military did not stop us from working. Now, they are stopping us from working."

Sources: Editor & Publisher, The New York Times

A new law will protect journalists investigating into corruption in Russia, starting from the beginning of 2009. The law will give them the same protection as court witnesses, reported Russia Today.
 
 "We need to have a clear mechanism of legal regulation on every journalist publication. We need investigations of prosecutor's offices, and some administrative measures if they prove necessary. Only then we'll feel the feedback and reaction on the part of the authorities. And we need journalists to be protected," said Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee.

This comes as a significant improvement in a country that is the third deadliest in the world for reporters, after Iraq and Algeria. Around 50 journalists have been killed in over 15 years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and many cases remain unsolved.

Source: Russia Today

See also:
Russia: Politkovskaya murder suspects caught
Russia: Kremlin adviser resigns over reporter's murder
GÖTEBORG: EXTENDED VIDEO - Garry Kasparov challenges Russian press freedom at World Editors Forum
Russia: English-language paper shuts down after government raid

What happens when the image is the story? When you pick a story to pull from the image - rather than sort through a photo file to find one fitting the story?

It sounds, "exactly upside down," which is exactly how Brian Storm, founder of 2005 start-up MediaStorm, describes their business model for the production and distribution of photojournalism.

"They take still images, motion-picture and video footage, and audio tape, seek out the best story within that material, and then create a narrative through cutting and editing, adding voices and music," reports the Wall Street Journal. "[It's] something like a documentary movie, a TV segment, a book that talks, or a magazine article that moves."

The multi-media production company, which gets images from individual photographers as well as archives and partners like the National Geographic Society and Reuters, has proved highly successful. Of the 22 stories available on their website, many are award-winning. Among others, "Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War" and "Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster" have received numerous accolades from the news community.

"MediaStorm's stories are not predictable; none of them preach. In this way, its aesthetic is very old fashioned, mainstream, almost apolitical," said Mary Panzer, of the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to production, MediaStorm also offers workshops to train journalists in multi-media techniques, equipment and software.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, says his document-leaking site is helping journalists change the world.

"Imagine a world where companies and government must keep the public, or their employees, or both, happy with their plans, and behavior," Assange says. "That is the world we are striving to create."

Wikileaks has been responsible for the leaking of several major news stories: the U.S. military's operating manuals for its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay; lists of U.S. munitions in Iraq; reports of the looting of Kenya by former president Daniel Arap Moi.

For investigative journalists, this powerful new resource has the potential to provide an endless stream of stories. Assange is beginning to tweak Wikileaks to better accommodate journalists, pre-releasing selected documents to reporters. He is also considering making Wikileaks a subscription service for journalists.

Though Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy Project, is critical of Wikileaks' indiscriminate release policy, he admits Wikileaks could be a powerful tool for journalists.

"Working reporters can use all the help and sources they can get, and Wikileaks does have a track record of getting their hands on documents that other people haven't," Aftergood says. "It also has the potential to introduce another layer of editorial judgment and I believe in editorial judgment on matters of confidentiality."

Source: Wired

Press freedom is under serious threat from many sources -- gangs and corrupt officials in Latin America, autocratic regimes in the Middle East, conflicts in Africa, hostile governments in Asia, and from death threats and prosecutions in central Asia and Europe, the World Association of Newspapers said in its half-year review of press freedom.

The report, presented Saturday to the Board of WAN on the eve of the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Göteborg, Sweden, painted a grim picture of attacks, imprisonment and murder facing journalists in many countries.

Twenty-eight journalists have been killed since November 2007. Iraq remains the most deadly country, with 9 killed.

The report, with region-by-region details, is available here.

Source: WAN

Lawrence Pintak, director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo recently completed a survey of 601 journalists in 13 Arab countries in North Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula.

When asked to name the top 10 missions of Arab journalism, participants named human rights, political reform, poverty and education as the most critical issues, trumping hot button topics like Palestinian statehood and the war in Iraq.

"Overwhelmingly, they wanted the clergy to stay out of politics. And, aside from the ever-present issue of Israel, they ranked 'lack of political change' alongside American policy as the greatest threats to the Arab world," wrote Pintak in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this week. "Many see themselves as agents of political and social change who believe it is their mission to reform the antidemocratic regimes they live under."

The results of Pintak's research will be published in The International Journal of Press/Politics in July.

Source: The New York Times

In this section, John Zogby, CEO of Zogby International, and George Brock, World Editors Forum President and editor of the Saturday Times in the UK, comment on the results of the 2008 Newsroom Barometer. Both agree that the results show editors have opened to the new necessities of the digital age, while remaining strongly conscious of the possible threats to their newspapers and journalism.

(View the main results to this year's survey here.)

According to Brock, this year's survey points to the fact that "editors remain confident about a mixed-media future and have quietly got on with the business of integrating their newsrooms," but this is "tempered by anxiety that newspapers are not investing enough in recruitment and training for the future."

The path is clear for many editors: integrate the newsroom, think multimedia, train or hire a team of multi-skilled journalists. So are the threats: lack of investment, lack of training, lack of cultural change.

In the face of these deep changes for the newspaper industry and its organization, editors may often face managerial resistance to undergo these investments. But media companies must be bold. Their editors, for the most part, are ready to be. Said Brock: "I read the message of this year's Newsroom Barometer as an appeal from editors to their companies to be bold in the face of change and as a sign that they themselves intend to make the most of new opportunities."

For Zogby, who goes into more detail about the numeric results (see below), this year's results show that editors have adapted or are adapting to the current redefinition of the 4th Estate, the press, in light of the changes brought in part by the Internet.

"Perhaps the most important finding to emerge from the 2008 survey is that editors remain optimistic about the futures of their papers," as was the case for the previous edition of the Newsroom Barometer, wrote Zogby.

Yet this optimism shouldn't hide the urgency for newspapers to rethink their model. "For these editors the future is self-evident and our survey shows that they see the writing on the newsroom wall.  The evolution of the 4th Estate is no longer questions of if, when or how.  Editors now know the solution:  Innovate.  Integrate.  Or perish."

Read Brock and Zogby's full comments below.

Comments on the 2008 Newsroom Barometer by George Brock

Editors remain confident about a mixed-media future and have quietly got on with the business of integrating their newsrooms. The optimism is not universal and it is tempered by anxiety that newspapers are not investing enough in recruitment and training for the future.

Newspaper managements might reply that investment remains risky when it isn't yet clear where the income from digital publishing is supposed to come from. But newspaper businesses are made by content which creates and sustains demand. The first newspapers did not come about when someone assembled advertising platforms, distribution networks and hardware and afterwards looked for content to put into that system.

The sequence of events was the reverse. Somebody wants to tell as many people as possible something of interest or importance, discovers a sustained curiosity in that information or opinion and eventually a publishing operation grows up to supply the demand. The chain reaction is sparked by interest in the story, view, picture, interview, column, cartoon that's on offer. Without that first moment of ignition, nothing else happens.

You think this sounds a little basic? It is. But you would be surprised how often this simple reality is forgotten as today's media businesses struggle to adapt to a world in which digital technology is rewriting the economics of news publishing.

Online news and opinion has now been with us for long enough to see that no prediction about the future of news which is based on technology alone can tell us the future. Newspapers are not just ink marks on squashed trees: they are what people trust, they amuse people, in short they are a collection of ideas and information with which a reader forms a relationship. Where journalism - whether professional, citizen or any mixture of the two - creates that relationship, something lasting is born and can be sustained. You can see examples of success and failure both online and in print. As the first flush of online innovation and enthusiasm wears off, we can see more clearly that some of the online successes will grow very big indeed, but that only the best will prosper. Making information available - and the web makes it available as never before - does not make it wanted. Newspapers which innovate and adapt will also survive because their qualities are more important than the medium. Some of the failures in both online and print will be terminal.

I read the message of this year's Newsroom Barometer as an appeal from editors to their companies to be bold in the face of change and as a sign that they themselves intend to make the most of new opportunities. Most editors are clear that the essential qualities of good journalism can adapt to a new medium. They accept as a fact needing no further debate that their papers will now reach their constituency by several channels and not by one.

Redefining the 4th Estate: Opinions of the Editors by John Zogby

In the 550 years since the first pages of print rolled off the presses in the Bavarian town of Mainz, printed news evolved relatively unimpeded.  Even the invention and proliferation of radio and television failed to stymie the growth of newspapers, largely due to the ability of newspapers to provide more in-depth coverage.
    
The centuries-long hegemony of the ink and paper news model today faces its greatest threat--the advent of an independent and free Internet-based media.  This threat was evidenced at the height of the 2005 British elections with the publication of the 'Downing Street Memo' by The Sunday Times.  That short but potent document presented potentially damning evidence surrounding the planning in the run-up to the Iraq War, and while British papers seized the story, the leaked memo made only slight ripples in the American print media.  It did create, however, a surge within the rapidly developing blog community who used the lack of traditional media coverage as a call to arms.

Now, as the Internet struggles to define itself in the shadow of the Fourth Estate, the question remains: will these two mediums continue to battle for supremacy or will they find stability in an integrated symbiotic relationship? To help bring clarity to this question, Zogby International was commissioned by the World Editors Forum and Reuters to survey 704 newspaper editors worldwide for the second in a series of annual 'Newsroom Barometer Surveys.'

    Perhaps the most important finding to emerge from the 2008 survey is that editors remain optimistic about the futures of their papers.  As in the 2006 Newsroom Barometer, nearly all editors (84%) are optimistic about the future of their paper.  The editors surveyed are as aware of what the future may hold for their industry as they are unified in their recognition of the underlying threats and potential solutions.

The Future

    The majority of editors (56%) now believe that most news (print and online) will be free in the future--up from 48% in 2006.  Nearly two-in-three editors (63%) believe that within a decade the most common form of  news consumption will be some form of electronic media--whether online (44%), mobile (12%) or through newer electronic media like e-papers and tablets (7%).  Less than a third (31%) believe print will remain the most common form of consumption.

    The perception of editors with respect to the future is not limited to the news product itself.  The overwhelming majority (83%) agree that within 5 years their nation's journalist workforce will be expected to know how to produce content for all platforms (e.g., print, video, audio and web).  Still, perception of the future is but one dimension of the story -- the remainder is defined by the threats to the industry and  how editors address those threats. 

The Threats

    By-and-large editors agree on the nature of the threats posed to their industry.  The decline in youth readership (58%), the rise in Internet and digital media (38%) and the lack of editorial innovation (36%) all speak to the consensus that change is imminent.  These editors tell us their chief sources of pressure are from advertisers (22%), shareholders (20%) and political forces (19%).  All pressure, no doubt,  to confront the changing reality through innovation and integration. 

    On one issue editors paint a mixed picture--the current state of their newsroom.  For some (39%) circulation in the past year is up; for others (29%) it is down.  One-third of editors (33%) have added journalists, a quarter have lost journalists (24%) and for the rest (42%) the number of journalists on their staff remains unchanged from a year ago. 


The Solutions

    When a majority of editors (54%) report that they have an integrated newsroom, they may make such statements not necessarily based on the reality, but also out of necessity.  Regardless of whether integration has or has not occurred, nearly all (86%) agree that it will be the norm in the near future.  Editors also agree on the steps needed to address other threats.  Asked what investments they would make in their newsroom given the opportunity, the top two investments cited--training journalists in new media (36%) and recruitment of new journalists (31%)--demonstrate that editors are looking to make a commitment to the future.  And with the recognition that editorial innovation is needed, 69% of editors agree that opinion and analysis pages will play an increasingly larger role in the future. 


Yes, editors are optimistic about the future of their papers, but they are also aware of the potential danger on the horizon.  Less than half (45%) believe the quality of journalism will improve over the next year.  More than a quarter (28%) believe the quality will worsen; a finding reflected in the high level of importance editors place on the need for investment in training and recruitment. 

For these editors the future is self-evident and our survey shows that they see the writing on the newsroom wall.  The evolution of the 4th Estate is no longer questions of if, when or how.  Editors now know the solution:  Innovate.  Integrate.  Or perish.


Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results

To mark World Press Freedom Day on May 3, the Council of Europe is launching an online discussion forum on media freedom in times of crisis, reports the European Journalism Centre.

The forum, intended for both journalists and anyone else concerned about freedom of expression, will center on how journalists do their job in the face of government restrictions during wars, terrorist threats and political instability.

This year's World Press Freedom Day comes days after a report by lobby group Freedom House concluded that global press freedom declined in 2007. According to the survey, Iraq and Somalia remain the most dangerous countries for journalists.

Sources: EJC, AFP

Earlier this month, Mayhill Fowler, a citizen journalist, had reported comments made by U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama, describing rural, white voters as "bitter," to Huffington Post's blog "Off the Bus." Guardian America editor Michael Tomasky believes there is a need for blogging rules and questions the ethics of citizen journalism, while Jeff Jarvis of the blog Buzzmachine has similar beliefs as Robert Niles that "nothing is off-the-record anymore" and that citizen journalists are now necessary.

Jarvis: "Openness for all"
Jarvis begins by saying that rules are "corrupting" for journalism. Journalists should not engage in off-the-record talks and list unnamed sources because they should not help public officials hide anything from the public. Though some exclusives may be lost, there will be more stories with more openness and more reporting, "and politicians will learn that anything and everything they say and do can (and should) be reported," according to Jarvis. 

Furthermore, Fowler knew Obama's remarks "would be newsworthy," says Jarvis, and though she is an Obama supporter, she chose to let the public know about those remarks so that they could form their own opinions. Also, even if Fowler did not blog for the Huffington Post, she could have reported the story through YouTube or other platforms.

Essentially, journalism is evolving, says Jarvis, with coverage expanding from journalists, witnesses, readers, bloggers, etc.  "Journalism becomes less of a product and more of a process," he remarks.

Tomasky: "Call them "witnesses" and drop the whole conceit that they're journalists"
Though he embraces blogs, mostly for elevating debate, Tomasky cannot see the importance of knowing every single word public people say, since people misspeak and say things they don't really mean.

He argues that though "rules" may cause corruption and secrets, anonymity is sometimes the only way a source with important information will come forward, for example, the Pentagon Papers and intelligence assessments about Iraq before the war

Also, he concedes that most journalists would not be for "hiding" things from the public, but they would favor verifying something before it is published, which is "scarcely complicity in secret-keeping," but rather,  "just being responsible."

As for the Obama incident, Tomasky points out that Fowler got through the doors because she donated money to Obama's campaign, but "veteran journalists" were not allowed in the door. Had those journalists been allowed, they would not have kept those remarks secret.

Jarvis counters, "There's also a difference between verifying such a tip with reporting - which we'll all agree is necessary - and playing that tape-recording, which itself was the verification anyone needed. Obama's words and voice spoke for themselves."

He says that these "witnesses," or citizen journalists, now start the story with papers expanding on them and doing more in-depth research. Because veteran journalists may not be allowed through the door, they must rely on "witnessing," which "will still add up to journalism in the end."

Tomasky remarks that "it's a little sneaky and sleazy to be a citizen ... and then getting to be a journalist for the purposes of writing it up."

Source: Guardian.co.uk

In case you've missed it, Reuters has created a documentary website, "Bearing Witness," to commemorate the War in Iraq. It is an excellent example of merging online journalism and multimedia to engage the viewer.

The introduction states the website's mission is: "bearing witness that the story of Iraq is not lost." The website is a comprehensive documentation of the five years of the war, including video footage, images, interviews with journalists who have covered the conflict, a visual timeline of the War, and more. It also supplies viewers maps and dangers of reporting in such a dangerous country, including a map of journalist fatalities.

























Source: Reuters