CPJ: Call for freedom for detained journalists after releases from Libya and Iran

The Committee to Protect Journalists said the latest release of foreign journalists being detained in Iran and Libya “is a very positive development”, but repeated its call for the release of others.

Yesterday it was confirmed that Al Jazeera journalist Dorothy Parvaz was released after being detained in Syria and then deported to Iran, while four journalists detained in Libya last month, including a British freelancer, were also released this week. Details of the whereabouts of a fifth journalist reported to have been detained in Libya at the same time, UK-based photographer Anton Hammerl, remain unknown.

“We are relieved that these journalists are free. It is now time for the Iranian and Libyan authorities to review the cases of dozens of journalists who remain imprisoned mainly for attempting to report on historic developments in the Middle East and North Africa,” said CPJ executive director Joel Simon.

According to the CPJ Iran, together with China, is the world’s top jailer of journalists with at least 34 in prison.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – five rules for using Storify

Writing on the Storify blog, Staci Baird has compiled five rules for using the increasingly popular social media curation tool:

Tipster: Joel Gunter.

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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Twitter limits third-party apps access to your DMs

Third-party applications that do not need access to direct messages will no longer have it, Twitter has announced.

There are hundreds of thousands of applications that can allow access to Twitter accounts and from next month many will face limitations.

Apps that access direct messages will ask for permissions again, Twitter has said in its blog, giving users more control.

When you first connect an application to Twitter, we’ll give you more detailed information about what you’re allowing the app to do with your account. These activities may include reading your Tweets, seeing who you follow, updating your profile, posting Tweets on your behalf, or accessing your direct messages. If you’re not comfortable with the level of access an application requests, simply say “No, thanks”.

You can see a summary of the applications you’ve approved and make changes by going to “settings” then clicking on the “applications” tab in your Twitter account.

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#followjourn: @annadoble – Anna Doble/journalist #newsrw

Who? Anna Doble

Where? Anna is an online journalist, site editor and social media producer for Channel 4 news. Anna also writes about music for the Spectator

Anna will be joining the panel for the Is liveblogging rewriting journalism? session at news:rewired – noise to signal. The full agenda and booking details for the event on Friday, 27 May, can be found here.

Twitter? @annadoble / @othermother_dj

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to sarah.booker at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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Journalisted Weekly: Injunctions, NHS & FIFA

Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about.

It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations.

Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.

for the week ending Sunday 15 May

• Privacy and NHS reform dominated political debate
• Alleged scandal over FIFA World Cup bid held front and back pages
• A Japan nuclear plant shut down and religious violence in Cairo, covered little

Covered lots

• Anonymous claims circulated on Twitter named celebrities who had allegedly taken out superinjunctions, prompting heated debate about UK privacy law, 141 articles
• The NHS reforms provoke more debate ahead of Cameron’s speech, with Clegg vowing to stand up to Tory plans, 127 articles
• Former FA chairman Lord Triesman accused FIFA executives of bribery in early stages of the 2018 world cup bid, sparking fresh outcries of a scandal, 96 articles

Covered little

• Two suicide bombs killed 80 Pakistani paramilitary cadets; the Pakistan Taliban claimed the attack as revenge for Bin Laden’s death, 14 articles
• Japan’s Prime Minister ordered the Hamaoka nuclear plant to be closed down, amidst fear of future earthquakes and a re-thinking of the country’s energy policies, 8 articles
• Riots in Cairo after two Coptic churches were set on fire, leaving 12 dead and over 200 injured, 7 articles

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

• David Cameron: 768 articles (+4% on previous week)
• Nick Clegg: 378 articles (-22% on previous week)
• George Osborne: 227 articles (+33% on previous week)
• Alex Salmond: 190 articles (-36% on previous week)
• Ed Miliband: 146 articles (-55% on previous week)
• Vince Cable: 142 articles (+38% on previous week)
• Tony Blair: 128 articles (-7% on previous week)
• Gordon Brown: 115 articles (-15% on previous week)
• Theresa May: 106 articles (+176% on previous week)
• Andrew Lansley: 95 articles (+239% on previous week)

Celebrity vs serious

• Cheryl Cole, judging US X Factor, 116 articles vs. 91-year-old former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk convicted for assisted killing of 28,000 Jews, after 3 decades of legal proceedings, 33 articles
• Johnny Depp, promoting the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film, 92 articles vs. a 5.1 Richter scale earthquake in southeastern Spain, killing nine and leaving 10,000 homeless, 54 articles
• UK boyband Blue performing on Eurovision, 70 articles vs. migrants fleeing North African unrest and dying at sea, with both Nato and the Libyan regime accused of neglect, 17 articles

Arab spring

• Libya and Colonel Gaddafi, 136 articles (-4% on previous week)
• Syria and President Bashar Al-Assad, 87 articles (+6% on previous week)
• Gaza and Hamas, 26 articles (-63% on previous week)
• Yemen and President Saleh, 22 articles (-4% on previous week)
• Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu, 16 articles (-58% on previous week)
• Egypt’s Military Council, 9 articles (+50% on previous week)
• West Bank and President Abbas, 8 articles (-70% on previous week)
• Iran and President Ahmadinejad, 5 articles (-44% on previous week)
• Turkey and Prime Minster Erdoğan, 4 articles (-50% on previous week)
• Saudi Arabia and King Abdullah, 3 articles (-67% on previous week)
• Bahrain and King Al Khalifa, 3 articles (-50% on previous week)
• United Arab Emirates and President Al Nahyan, 3 article (+200% on previous week)
• Algeria and President Bouteflika, 1 article (0% on previous week)

Who wrote a lot about…’privacy’

Frances Gibb – 9 articles (The Times), Tim Bradshaw – 6 articles (Financial Times), Josh Halliday – 6 articles (The Guardian), Dan Sabbagh – 6 articles (The Guardian), Steven Swinford – 6 articles (Telegraph), Roy Greenslade – 5 articles (The Guardian)

Long form journalism

• 5,624 words: Adoption: ‘They need more than just love’’ – Carol Midgley, The Times, 9th May 2011
• 3,906 words: London’s Air Ambulance, saviour of the skies – Eric Clark, Telegraph, 12th May 2011
• 2,831 words: Safe house – Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, 14th May 2011

More from the Media Standards Trust

Visit the Media Standards Trust’s new site Churnalism.com – a public service for distinguishing journalism from churnalism

Churnalism.com ‘explore’ page is available for browsing press release sources alongside news outlets

The Media Standards Trust’s unofficial database of PCC complaints is available for browsing at www.complaints.pccwatch.co.uk

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

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Data Miner: Liberating Cabinet Office spending data

The excellent Nicola Hughes, author of the Data Miner UK blog, has a very practical post up about how she scraped and cleaned up some very messy Cabinet Office spending data.

Firstly, I scraped this page to pull out all the CSV files and put all the data in the ScraperWiki datastore. The scraper can be found here.

It has over 1,200 lines of code but don’t worry, I did very little of the work myself! Spending data is very messy with trailing spaces, inconsistent capitals and various phenotypes. So I scraped the raw data which you can find in the “swdata” tab. I downloaded this and plugged it into Google Refine.

And so on. Hughes has held off on describing “something interesting” that she has already found, focusing instead on the technical aspects of the process, but she has published her results for others to dig into.

Before I can advocate using, developing and refining the tools needed for data journalism I need journalists (and anyone interested) to actually look at data. So before I say anything of what I’ve found, here are my materials plus the process I used to get them. Just let me know what you find and please publish it!

See the full post on Data Miner UK at this link.

Nicola will be speaking at Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired conference next week, where data journalism experts will cover sourcing, scraping and cleaning data along with developing it into a story.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – finding and telling political stories

From Routledge’s journalism courses page: advice on finding, developing, and telling political stories.

To investigate and gather a story fast you need to know who has the information you need, and who can speak to you. Key among them are special advisers, often known as SpAds, and government press officers. They have distinctly different roles and can help you in different ways.

Full post at this link.

Tipster: Joel Gunter.

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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#followjourn: @greghadfield – Greg Hadfield/journalist #newsrw

Who? Greg Hadfield

Where? Greg is a former Fleet Street journalist who left the Telegraph to join digital design agency Cogapp. He blogs about Brighton and Hove an open data city.

Greg will be speaking during the local data session at news:rewired – noise to signal. The full agenda and booking details for the event on Friday, 27 May, can be found here.

Twitter? @greghadfield / @opendatacities

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to sarah.booker at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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News sites beware: Google News readers can block all blogs

Google News has made updates to allow users to further personalise the type of news they read.

Readers can now omit sites, choose to read more news from a selected site, increase or decrease the amount of blogs that appear or batch exclude all blogs from their Google News home page at one fell swoop.

Both blogs and news sites need to check how they are categorised by Google News. Just because you do not describe your site as a blog, doesn’t mean that Google News hasn’t listed you as one.

It is not clear how news sites can have their blog status removed but this form will allow your to flag it up with Google News

Hat tip: Search Engine Land

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Media release: Chris Ellis appointed MD of digital for Trinity Mirror nationals

Trinity Mirror today announced the appointment of Chris Ellis to a newly created role of managing director, digital, within its nationals division.

The former senior vice president and chief operating officer for Europe at MySpace will be responsible for increasing digital growth, according to a release.

Chris Ellis, said: “I’m delighted to be joining Trinity Mirror. I’m excited by the opportunity to lead the new dedicated digital group which, together with such a strong editorial heritage and passionate consumer base, means the company is well positioned to take full advantage of the growth of all things digital.”

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