#cablegate: WikiLeaks appeals for support amid sustained cyber attacks

It’s more than a week after WikiLeaks began publishing secret US diplomatic cables but the organisation continues to occupy the headlines. Yesterday Reporters Without Borders claimed that the site had made an appeal for hosting help amid mounting cyber attacks, calling for support in creating mirror sites.

“WikiLeaks is currently under heavy attack,” the site said in a message posted yesterday. “In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the Internet, we need your help. If you have a Unix-based server which is hosting a website on the internet and you want to give WikiLeaks some of your hosting resources, you can help!”

The appeal follows a decision by Amazon to stop hosting WikiLeaks’ site last week and EveryDNS.net to stop providing the organisation with its .org web address.

News also broke this week that the US is considering using US Espionage Act and other laws to prosecute WikiLeaks.

In a Reuters report, US Attorney General Eric Holder is said to have claimed that “there are other statutes, other tools at our disposal”.

The Espionage Act dates back to 1917 and was focused on making it illegal to obtain national defense information for the purpose of harming the United States. Holder described the law as “pretty old” and lawmakers are considering updating it in the wake of the leak.

Today WikiLeaks vowed, via its Twitter account, to continue to release more cables tonight despite the arrest of the whistleblower founder Julian Assange in London earlier today. According to a blog post on the Australian, Assange is also due to be writing exclusively for the paper tomorrow.

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Paper.li adds Facebook to social newspaper function

Paper.li, a personalised social newspaper project launched in March this year that turns a Twitter stream into a newspaper format, has today launched similar functionality with public Facebook posts.

In an announcement on the site’s blog, it explains how this will work:

Facebook currently supports only very basic keyword searches on public posts – so a paper based on the search ‘climate energy’ will find all posts containing both words – paper.li then extracts all links, videos and photos, analyzes them, ranks them and creates the paper in a similar fashion to Twitter papers.

Paper.li is also looking into other possibilities with Facebook, such as creating papers for individual users.

Hatip: Techcrunch.com

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Emmy Award-winning UBC journalism students form new partnership with Globe and Mail

In September, a group of students from the University of British Columbia won an Emmy Award for their documentary on the dumping of electronic waste. The students were working in partnership with the PBS documentary series Frontline and now the university is at it again, joining forces with the Globe and Mail for an investigation into shrimp and food sustainability.

Full report on the new project at Reportr.net…

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Comment is Free: Al-Jazeera is not Qatar’s ‘poodle’

Mark Seddon, a journalist formerly with Al-Jazeera, responds to yesterday’s reports on US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks that suggested the Arabic arm of the broadcaster has been used as a “tool of foreign policy” by the Qatari government,

[T]he idea that al-Jazeera tempers its editorial content at the behest of the emir of Qatar, who mainly finances it, is possibly as fanciful as the WikiLeaks report that US diplomats believed their South Korean counterparts when they said that China might recognise a unified Korea under the aegis of Seoul. Conjecture does not always meet with reality. Al-Jazeera, in its swashbuckling and sometimes disorganised way, has shown itself quite adept at resisting pressure wherever it may come from.

Full article on Comment is Free at this link…

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jBlog: How Facebook credits could save newspapers

Dave Lee offers some interesting ideas on how a virtual gifts or credit model implemented via Facebook could help newspaper publishers rethink their revenue models.

Am I telling everyone that newspapers need to start deploying farm-based games across their sites? No, don’t be silly. What I am saying is that people’s desire to have Facebook Credits in order to play online games is, for editors, a gift from the gods. Suddenly, we’ve got millions of people – young people, don’t forget – who have credits. Credits which they didn’t buy to read news but, now they’ve got them won’t give much thought to spending a couple on content.

The newspaper would, on current rates (dictated by Facebook), take 70 per cent of each credit’s monetary value.

I believe, ladies and gents, that’s what we call a business model.

Full post on Dave Lee’s blog at this link…

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Wired.com: ‘Why WikiLeaks is good for America’

Wired magazine has had a somewhat fractious relationship with whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks since the latter rose to prominence.

Speaking at the beginning of October at City University London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hit out at the magazine for allegations it made about infighting at the organisation.

Later in the month he made further criticisms of two particular blogs on Wired.com:

We condemned Wired magazine for that conduct and the magazine has been oppositional ever since. The two blogs concerned, “Threat Level” and “Danger Room”, while having produced some good journalism over the years, mostly now ship puff pieces about the latest “cool weapons system” and other “war tech toys” as befits their names – “Threat Level” and “Danger Room”.

But Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen, writing yesterday on the Threat Level blog, clearly thinks the organisation is a force for good in the world, or in the US at least:

WikiLeaks is not perfect, and we have highlighted many of its shortcomings on this website. Nevertheless, it’s time to make a clear statement about the value of the site and take sides:

WikiLeaks stands to improve our democracy, not weaken it.

See the full post – Why WikiLeaks is good for America – at this link…

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International deadline for Nieman Fellowships fast approaching

The world’s oldest journalism fellowships are open to entries and the deadline for international applicants is fast approaching. The Nieman Fellowships allow around two dozen journalists, usually half from the US and half from other countries around the world, to study at Harvard for a year in the field of their choice.

Some study classic journalism-influencing subjects like economics, history, or government; some dive deep into a particular topic area they’ve worked in before. Others want to study the kinds of Lab-like subjects that will influence journalism’s future: revenue models at Harvard Business School, digital media at the Berkman Center, nonprofit structures at the Hauser Center, online media law at Harvard Law School.

There are no age restrictions, but you need to have spent a minimum of five years as a working journalist before you can apply. Deadline is 15 December for non-US applicants.

Visit Nieman Journalism Lab at this link for more information.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – getting ahead in the media business

Careers: Top tips for getting ahead in the media business from the co-founder of Briefing Media Rory Brown in this video from Propeller TV. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Don’t direct students to file FOI requests to universities, Texas lecturers told

From the US last week, but worth reading – a curious situation for journalism academics:

Journalism teachers sometimes instruct students to file such requests under the Texas Public Information Act to gain experience using an important tool for reporters.

But in response to an inquiry from Tarleton State University in Stephenville, an A&M [Texas A&M University] campus about 155 miles north of Austin, the system’s general counsel warned that a faculty member could be disciplined and even fired for directing students to file requests with any of the system’s 12 universities and seven agencies. Faculty members are free to direct students to file requests with other state universities and agencies.

Full story on Statesman.com at this link…

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Guardian.co.uk: ‘Why we were right to publish the WikiLeaks embassy cables’

The Guardian’s readers’ editor Chris Elliott weighs in on the newspaper’s decision to partner WikiLeaks in the release of the US embassy cables:

The simple journalistic truth that underpins probably the largest and most complex reporting exercise ever undertaken by the Guardian is that all the stories emerging from the WikiLeaks material would have been important public-interest stories in any circumstances.

Full post on Guardian.co.uk at this link…

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