The Associated Press published a story based on a fake press release yesterday, Business Insider reported, claiming that General Electric would repay its entire $3.2 billion tax refunds to the US Treasury. Thirty-five minutes later, after some news outlets had already picked up the story, AP withdrew the article and advised its customers that it was a hoax. "The AP did not follow its own standards in this case for verifying the authenticity of a news release," said AP Business Editor Hal Ritter, according to ABC News.

A grassroots movement called US Uncut, working together with the notorious activist-prankster group the Yes Men, soon took credit for the hoax. The collective's spokesperson said that the intention was to bring more public attention to corporations that avoid paying taxes. "For a brief moment people believed that the biggest corporate tax dodger had a change of heart and actually did the right thing," the spokesperson said in a statement published on the Yes Men's website.

The hoax comes at an embarrassing time for the GE as last month The New York Times ran an extensive article about the corporation, concentrating on its tax-avoidance strategy in particular. Understandably, this resulted in plenty of bad publicity for GE. However, even though the prank momentarily affected GE's shares, as the ABC noted, Forbes's Giovanni Rodrigues speculated that the biggest victims of the media stunt were in fact AP and other news outlets that fell for the hoax.

Poynter's Jim Romenesko presented examples of earlier similar pranks, remarking that this is not the first time that news outlets are fooled by hoaxers. It has been pointed out that too often news agencies rely on press releases, failing to carry out sufficient fact-checking. This case serves to remind news outlets of the importance of a thorough source verification process.

Sources: Business Insider, ABC News, the Yes Men, The New York Times, ABC, Forbes, Poynter

Al Jazeera's extensive coverage of the unrest in the Arab world has helped the news agency become something of an authority on issues relating to the region. Riyaad Minty, Al Jazeera's head of social media, recently took part in the Media140 conference in Barcelona. One of the discussed topics, Journalism.co.uk reported, was the network's approach of making use of on-location sources.

A key strategy for Al Jazeera, Minty said, was to get in early and make contact with important bloggers and sources. The idea was to identify key bloggers before protests broke out, so they could help verify information later on and act as citizen reporters.

"The key to getting in early is verifying information before the noise gets out," Minty said. "We had peoples' phone numbers, we could call them up and get things verified by them."

Social media obviously had a significant role to play in keeping in touch with the citizen reporters on the ground, and Al Jazeera's efficient and accomplished ways of using Twitter have already been acknowledged. But utilising new media alone would not have been enough - one has to also know what to do with it. What the use of new media permits is a more integral way of involving regular citizens in the news reporting process.

Al Jazeera is not alone in embracing the resource of citizen journalists, rather online news services are increasingly engaging with their audience, actively encouraging them to take part in news reporting. France 24, for example, features a section on its website called The Observers, in which eyewitnesses can submit text, video and images from current events. Many professional media sites also host blogs in addition to news reporting. There used to be a clear separation between professional and citizen journalism, but the two ways of reporting are now approaching each other in many ways.

Al Jazeera's success would suggest that professional news media can benefit greatly from people on the ground, at the heart of world-changing events. What other ways are there for news agencies to make use of citizen journalists?

Sources: Journalism.co.uk, France 24

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade discussed a new book that highlights a hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) tendency in the British press to approach matters relating to Islam from a prejudiced standpoint. Pointing the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media, edited by Julian Petley and Robin Richardson, presents examples of misleading news reporting on Islam-related matters. "Few topics are as controversial as the media treatment of Muslims, and too few journalists take it seriously," Greenslade wrote.

Greensdale acknowledges that the press has a strong influence when it comes to shaping views on minorities and encourages all journalists to read the book. "It is press-generated myths about Islam that fuel misunderstandings and feed prejudice, and thus bedevil rational discussion," Greenslade asserted.

Greenslade singled out Daily Express as one of the newspapers that release stories with an anti-Muslim slant. Last month, a former reporter of Daily Star criticised the paper for having an anti-Muslim agenda. One does not have to look far to find one possible reason why papers might resort to advocating such views. Earlier this year, Baroness Warsi, a senior Conservative, said that Muslim prejudice had become socially acceptable in the UK and that media had a played role in this development, BBC reported. According to her, attacking the Muslim community in the media sold papers and was seen as appropriate.

Pointing the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media was published this week, coinciding closely with the French law that bans the burqa and niqab taking effect this Monday.

Sources: The Guardian, BBC

The News of the World published an apology last Sunday, admitting liability in accessing voicemail messages. In addition to apologising "unreservedly," the paper announced that it was going to pay compensation to phone-hacking victims and set up a compensation scheme. "What happened to [the victims] should not have happened. It was and remains unacceptable," the apology said.

The confession marks a shift in the paper's attitude: instead of distancing itself from the arrested journalists by labeling them "rogue reporters" - a claim that was immediately challenged - the News of the World now accepts some degree of responsibility over the events. However, according to The Independent, some critics have said that the apology is more a "damage limitation exercise" than a genuine admission of wrongdoings. The careful wording of the apology (it does not discuss the extent of phone-hacking, for example) and lack of real new information would suggest this.

The chances are that the newspaper's apology is not going to bring the long-running issue to closure but only a beginning of a new chapter. Following the NOTW's apology, The Independent published a lawyer's estimate, according to which it is possible that up to 7000 people have had their voicemail intercepted. This would mean that the practice of phone-hacking has been far more extensive than previously thought as currently only 24 people have started civil proceedings for breach of privacy against the paper. Moreover, The Guardian reported that some of the known victims have already rejected the newspaper's apology.

The latest development in the phone-hacking scandal has erupted at an extremely inconvenient time for News International, the newspaper's owner, as the corporation is preparing a controversial takeover of BSkyB. The merger has been criticised as undermining media plurality in the UK significantly but has already been approved by the UK culture secretary and the European Commission. MP John Prescott said that the decision on whether to allow the takeover should be delayed while the phone-hacking inquiry is underway, Journalism.co.uk reported.

So far the News of the World is the only newspaper that has been shown to be involved in phone-hacking, but there have been calls for a more widespread inquiry to determine how common the practice is in the press in general. The mayor of London Boris Johnson - who is one of the people whose voicemail was hacked - suggested in his column on The Telegraph that the whole of Fleet Street could be involved in "doing very much the same sort of thing".

Sources: News of the World, The Independent, The Guardian, Journalism.co.uk, The Telegraph