The 10-year anniversary of the September 11 2001 terrorist attack is approaching and the news landscape is preparing for it.

The Knight Center offers an overview on how US news media are planning special coverage of the anniversary, while, as AP reported (via WSJ), Al Jazeera English, which didn't exist at the time of the attacks, aims to bring an "a global perspective to the anniversary that domestic networks likely won't". Facebook, in partnership with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and social marketing platform Involver, as the Washington Post reported, launched a Web app asking people to share how they are remembering the 9/11 attacks.

Besides the impact from a political, cultural and international point of view, news media are also debating on the effect that this last decade has had on the news itself.

What has changed in these ten years from a journalistic point of view? How is the press covering the anniversary?
The debate also includes whether this massive coverage of the anniversary, that will dominate news front pages, is appropriate or not and, as The New York Times wrote, how to draw a line between commemoration and exploitation.

The French online news site Rue89, for example, has decided to skip 9/11 anniversary coverage. Rue89 founder Pierre Haski commented on the decision on Twitter: "Les anniversaires sont 1 des plaies du journalisme. Resultat : tout le monde fait la même chose au même moment. Pas d'anniv sur @Rue89." (Anniversaries are one of the bains of journalism. As a consequence, everyone does the same thing at the same time. No anniversaries on Rue89).

On the other side, Poynter analysed how America's news habits have changed as well as the media's role has.

The differences in the way people consume news of course also affects this issue. Print newspapers are loosing ground to the Internet and this appears to be true also in this context. As Poynter pointed out, this shift was particularly evident in the way people got their news about Bin Laden's death in May, by which time only people 65 and older got more of their news from newspapers than the Internet, the article said. "Turn on the television" was what people calling each other on 9/11 morning were saying, the article noted, while Bin Laden's death rapidly spread on Twitter.

Poynter also highlighted that Facebook, Twitter and some news aggregators sites like the Huffington Post that so now have much clout, didn't even exist ten years ago.

But still, what Poynter's article correctly underlined is that what newspapers' front pages on the morning of September 12 2011 did was a lot more than just giving the news: they were trying to convey a meaning to the event.

No matter in which way we get the news, what newspapers can still continue to do is to enshrine something that captures the meaning of the event, providing the necessary background to approach and analyse what has happened.

Sources: New York Times (1), (2), AP (via WSJ), Washington Post, Twitter, Foreign Affairs, Knight Center, Poynter
Image source: New York Times

The UK phone-hacking scandal, that involves Rupert Murdoch's tabloid News of the World, is blowing up relentlessly. Revelations come out continuously and the news media is trying to follow them with breaking news updates.

Two are the main news of the day.
Firstly, the announcement by James Murdoch of the upcoming closure of the News of the World, compromised in its credibility and abandoned by advertisers, after 168 years.
The paper published the statement on its website.
Poynter's Rick Edmonds reflected on why shutting down the newspaper was a good business decision here and Guardian's Roy Greenslade collected what newspapers said about the closure here.

Second big news is the arrest of Andy Coulson, former NoW editor and later Downing Street's director of communication. Political implications are huge.
The Telegraph published a severe critic here.

The scandal has called into question the role of the Press Complaint Commission and generally the self-regulation system of the press, as the Guardian reported on.

The scandal is gradually widening: the Guardian reported in its live update coverage that Police have raided the Daily Star offices.
Significant developments took place - and are taking place - in the Police investigations. The Guardian reported that the Police "is investigating evidence that a News International executive may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard's inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal".

Another issue that the scandal will affect is the buyout of BskyB, which shares have been falling all day. The Telegraph wrote about it and Journalism.co.uk reported on culture secretary Jeremy Hunt who has been considering the impact of the News of the World closure could have on the BskyB bid.

Journalism.co.uk realized also a timeline of the scandal from the very early beginner in 2003 till now. You can see it here.

Wider reflections on the scandal and its aftermaths can be found on the Economist or on the BBC News site, which in this article analysed also the past "Fleet Street's dark era". The Independent examined the crisis of the Murdoch's empire. PBS's MediaShift reflected on the thin bounder between privacy and the public need to know.

The news spread also internationally.
The US Daily Beast wrote a "who's who" guide within the scandal.
French Le Monde reported on NoW here and Spanish El Pais wrote a round-up of the articles dealing with the matter.
Italian Il Post published a very comprehensive article about the whole scandal, from its origins.
Guardian's Roy Greenslade reported on what US newspapers said about it. Poynter published a round-up on the front pages in the UK and Canada featuring News of the World closing.

Sources: News of the World, Poynter (1), (2), Guardian (1), (2), (3), (4), (5) MediaShift, Journalism.co.uk (1), (2), Telegraph (1), (2), Economist, BBC News, The Independent, the Daily Beast, Le Monde, El Pais, Il Post

Since 2006, The New York Times has held its annual "Win a Trip" contest with reporter Nicholas Kristof, offering students (and starting from this year someone 60 or over), the chance to accompany Kristof on a reporting assignment to Africa. Participants apply by submitting either an essay or a video explaining why they should be chosen for the experience.

This is just a small part of the wider attention Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, pays to Africa. His second Pulitzer, won in 2006, was awarded for his coverage of the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Kristof's most recent column appeared in the New York Times Sunday Review on July 1st, and reflected on his latest African adventure within the "Win a Trip" contest. At the same time, and as he points out on his blog, the column was also an attempt to address a broader discontent about the way news media and journalists write about Africa.

Despite having dedicated great attention to Africa, Kristof fears that journalism only focuses on the dark side of the country: wars, poverty, disease, and humanitarian disasters that encourage the perception of the continent as a basket case. This narrative leaves out the story of the Africa that is on the move, or the "bustling dynamos of Botswana or Ghana", as he said.

On the other hand, for some issues or regions, the problem seems to be "not their over-coverage but, rather, their under-coverage". Kristof gave the example of eastern Congo, the "most lethal conflict since World War II", that has been dedicated few column inches.

The rift is between putting certain issues in the limelight to drive public attention while avoiding painting an overly catastrophic picture. To balance these two tendencies, Kristof usually tries to remind readers that two sides of the coin exist for every story.

The real problem, however, is that "it's hard to get readers interested in Africa". Not only does his column readership plunge whenever he writes about the continent, but even positive news articles risk attracting "about zero readership".

Kristof's reflection presents at least three questions: Firstly, as he wrote in his blog posting, "how do we adequately cover the disease and poverty of Africa, without leading readers to an unfairly grim perception of the entire region?" Secondly, who shapes the news agenda? And finally, just what are readers interested in, as apparently Africa doesn't raise much interest for the Western/European readership.

Journalism traditionally shapes the news agenda and the role of quality journalism should be that of highlighting and covering the news necessary for citizens to exercise their duty of citizenship. Journalism is therefore a pillar of democracy.

But the question remains, should news media focus on important issues in spite of the attention - or lack of - they attract among readers?
This comes up against the double nature of journalism: the "paradox of the Fourth Estate", as George Boyce describes it, "with its head in politics and its feet in commerce".
News media should serve democracy and democracy is best served by an independent news media (even if not all news media does support democracy - but this is another story). On the other hand, a newspaper is also a commercial product and has to respond to consumer interests.

As has already been reported, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are coming to the aid of quality investigative journalism, helping to cover stories in-depth and filling the gap newspapers are sometimes no longer able to fill due to high costs (foreign bureaus for example) or the time speed.

Why is Africa not a top issue? Why doesn't the continent attract the attention of Western/European readers?

We can speculate that newspapers write about China, India and Russia in part for the economic role they play on a global level, in the same way that the Middle East and North Africa - particularly given the recent uprisings in the Arab world - receive a lot of focus for the consequences they have on Western stability. These are not the only reasons, of course, but there are general themes that can be identified which feed the global news agenda. The themes concerning Africa are overwhelmingly negative.

It is also important not to feed a purely Western perception of the issues that African journalists themselves should have a prominent role in covering. They are the ones who should be putting Africa on the international stage, giving prominence to the vast array of untold stories the Western news media chooses to ignore.

Such questions are not easy to answer, but just beginning to speculate about them is a good start for Africa.

Sources: New York Times (1), (2), Editors Weblog

François-Xavier Lefranc, director of the regional and local newspaper Ouest-France spoke at WAN-IFRA's Summer University in Paris about the paper's new strategy in developing and multiplying local coverage in order to increase circulation.

As the name implies, Ouest-France, with 47 local editions, covers three regions in the west of France: Normandie, Bretagne and Pays de la Loire, which represent a mosaic of territories with 12 departments and 4800 towns.

According to French circulation bureau OJD's figures, it is the best selling French newspaper and, after Le Parisien, its website is second in the ranking of French regional newspapers' websites with 8.7 millions unique users.
In recent years, the paper's strategy has been to multiply the number of edition for a same geographical area, creating new local pages. Since Ouest France started to introduce new editions 3 years ago, circulation has gone up, Lefranc said.

The area of Brittany was previously covered by 5 editions and the two important territories of Saint-Brieuc and Lamballe were covered by the same local edition. As part of Ouest-France's new strategy they were split into two different editions in order to generate more local pages.
The circulation of the new edition area increased from the 1,5% to 4%.

Lefranc stressed how important it is to focus on the audience's needs, as even if the region is small it is very diversified and different editions have to meet everyone's needs.

The launch of new editions also means an rethinking of the whole editorial strategy and the redefinition of the paper's priorities. "Each time we create a new edition we try to completely recreate the editorial project", Lefranc said.

Local coverage is therefore the paper's priority. As the aim is to help people to understand their region and get closer to readers, journalists need to have a high knowledge of the area.

Continuous contact with readers, in order to stay in touch with people's concerns, is maintained by monitoring comments in-house, rather than outsourcing them.
For the same purpose of building and maintaining communication with readers, all breaking news is free to access, while to access the whole newspaper online, readers have to pay.

All our journalists have a multimedia approach. As soon as a journalist has material, he or she uploads it.

Recently Ouest-France has also invested in a new print press to develop new editions, as Lefranc said his paper believes that developments needs to be both in print and on the web.