A Bahraini blogger has been handed a life sentence, another has received 15 years in prison, according to Reporters Without Borders.
The two were among 21 activists to be accused of belonging to terrorist organisations and trying to overthrow the government, the pressure group says on its site.
Blogger Abduljalil Al-Singace was handed a life sentence; Ali Abdulemam, who was tried in absentia, was given 15 years, Global Voices, an international bloggers network Abdulemam contributes to, also reports on the sentencing.
“The only crime committed by Abdulemam and Al-Singace was freely expressing opinions contrary to those of the government,” Reporters Without Borders said in its post. “These sentences, handed down at the end of trial that flouted defence rights, are typical of the intransigence that the authorities have been showing towards those identified as government opponents, who have borne the full brunt of their repression. The international community must call the government to account on its strategy of stifling all dissent.”
Singace was rearrested on 16 March after being held from September to February. He was previously arrested in 2009 for allegedly trying to destabilise the government because of articles posted on his blog.
According to Reporters Without Borders, Abdulemam is regarded as one of Bahrain’s internet pioneers and is an active member of Bahrain Online, a pro-democracy forum that gets more than 100,000 visitors a day despite being blocked within Bahrain. He was also detained from September to February but avoided being rearrested and has been in hiding for several months.
SoundCloud has clocked up an impressive five million users, with four million of those joining within the past year.
Although born out of the founders’ love of music and created to visualise and reference sound, it is seeing a growth in popularity among journalists.
There are no statistics available to document how many SoundCloud recordings are categorised as ‘news’, but speaking via Skype from his base in Berlin, Alexander Ljung, CEO and founder of SoundCloud, told Journalism.co.uk the number of spoken word recordings is increasing.
It’s a big trend at the moment in that we are seeing non-music content growing very fast.
What is SoundCloud?
SoundCloud allows users to upload audio or record directly from the SoundCloud website, or from its desktop, iPhone or Android app. The really powerful thing about it is the ability to add comments at particular points on the audio waveform and allow others to share their views, too.
For example, I can add a comment to the waveform below at the point where Ljung starts talking about major news organisations using SoundCloud. I can also include a link within the comment to take listeners straight to the app and you can also add comments using your Twitter or Facebook account.
Other big advantages for journalists include being able to embed the SoundCloud recording on a news website, download an mp3 for editing, and engaging with the now vast SoundCloud community. See the report here for five ideas on how journalists can use SoundCloud.
SoundCloud has been around since 2008, after Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss came up with the idea in response to their need to discuss their own music and sound files, Ljung said.
I was previously a sound designer for film and tv. I was always working a lot with sound effects, voiceovers, things like that, and Eric’s music is also very detailed.
Eric and I felt it’s very difficult to talk about sound through email because it’s a non-visual thing and therefore it’s hard to reference it. We wanted to first visualise the sound and then put comments in to make it easier to collaborate.
Although SoundCloud started with music in mind, it was hoped it would go beyond, and it has done so, both in terms of music-related spoken content and journalism.
Since the launch of the apps, we’ve seen a lot of bands posting interviews from their tours and almost using it like Twitter and just sharing audio with the world.
We’re also starting to see more and more traditional news organisations like France 24 or 77WABC Radio putting up programming. There has also been some stuff by ESPN on the sports side.
Ljung told Journalism.co.uk that he also a big fan of the Next Web’s Daily Dose, a round-up of the tech news from the previous day.
They came up with this really nice format. I get that in my dashboard once a day it’s been really successful.
It is perhaps not surprising that Ljung favours the SoundCloud experience to listening to podcasts, a format he called “broken” in a recent interview in the Telegraph.
Podcasting is alive and great but the system for it at the moment is a bit broken. If you think about how we consume content today, like YouTube videos, we want to have them streamed, on demand, embeddable.
If you have a widget like [YouTube or SoundCloud] it lends itself to a lot of social interaction. When you look at the traditional podcasting system it’s all about subscribing to a feed, downloading, syncing, and there is no social interaction around it.
Even though the system is broken, there’s a huge demand for that kind of stuff out there that people are willing to jump though hoops to experience it.
I think [SoundCloud] has a chance to really bring back podcasting and that kind of publishing back into the spotlight again.”
His argument is that choosing SoundCloud over traditional podcasting methods makes audio “so much more accessible to people in the way that they want to consume it”.
But one problem with SoundCloud is it relies on Flash-based widgets, both for recording and for consuming audio, and Apple products such as the iPhone and the iPad do not support Flash (so apologies for those reading this story in the Journalism.co.uk iPhone app as you cannot see the embedded SoundCloud wave file above).
Although our website is built in HTML5, our widgets are currently Flash only as we haven’t felt the technology is ready for it. As soon as we can do it in a different way, we will.
SoundCloud developers have been working on a non-Flash option for viewing SoundCloud widgets for some time. “It probably won’t be that long before that works,” he said, but was unable to commit to a timescale beyond that a solution would be available “quite soon”.
However, there is an option for developers to build their own SoundCloud apps using the developers toolset or to make sites suitable for devices that do not support Flash, such as the iPad.
We also have a full, open API and different code snippets that we’ve open sourced and made free to be able to integrate that into your application. So if you’re building an iPhone app then you can use SoundCloud right away or if you’re building a website you can build your own JavaScript or iPhone-based widgets.
And developers have been making the most of the open API. SoundCloud Labs showcases various third-party apps and experiments.
One that has potential uses for journalists is SoundCloud Importer which allows you to record and display a phone interview on SoundCloud. At the time of writing the UK telephone number does not work, however. The options of importing audio via email and converting audio already online to SoundCloud do work and offer further possibilities.
Even if there are still obstacles in displaying SoundCloud widgets on Apple devices – and this may discourage you to embed SoundCloud files – remember there is a five million-strong community to engage with and it is not a bad idea for journalists to be adding audio to SoundCloud as a matter of course.
A post on the 10,000 Words blog asks if you have ever wondered how tweets get their brand name beside the time stamp? You will see ‘The New York Times’ beside the date on this embedded tweet has a hyperlink to take you directly to the NY Times website.
It’s very simple, actually, provided you have access to a WordPress.org (self-hosted) blog. (Or, if you are a PC user, click here for another solution.)
A woman has been arrested in West Yorkshire by police investigating allegations of phone hacking, Scotland Yard confirmed this morning.
The arrest was made by the Metropolitan police’s Operation Weeting team, which was set up when Scotland Yard relaunched its inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World in January.
According to a statement from Scotland Yard the woman, 39, was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept mobile phone voicemail messages and was taken to a West Yorkshire police station for questioning.
The BBC reports that owner of the News of the World, News International, had issued a statement saying the arrest “did not relate to a current employee or a former full-time staff member”.
We have been co-operating fully with the police inquiry since our voluntary disclosure of evidence reopened the police investigation. Since then we have been determined to deal with these issues both on the criminal and civil side. In April we admitted liability in several civil cases and we are attempting to bring these to a fair resolution.”
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.
On his Online Journalism blog Paul Bradshaw outlines a new service from Google called ‘Search by Image’, which he says allows you to find images and information by uploading, dragging over, or pasting the URL of an existing image. This could be very useful for journalists in terms of verifying images, he adds.
There’s a video here detailing exactly what you’re able to do with the new service.
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 19 June
Covered lots
Royal Ascot, the big annual race meeting, plus a drunken brawl, 303 articles
Greece’s financial crisis, with anti-austerity riots in Athens and Prime Minister George Papandreou offering to step down or form a unity government, 158 articles
The row over public sector pensions, with Danny Alexander announcing a rise in retirement age to 66 and quarter of a million workers threatening strike action, 119 articles
Footballer Frank Lampard, engaged to TV star Christine Bleakley, 60 articles vs. Al Qaida annoucing their new leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, 39 articles
Hugh Hefner, dumped the week of his wedding, 33 articles vs. the ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ blog, actually written by a 40-something American man in Edinburgh, 25 articles
Singer Amy Winehouse, drunk on stage in Serbia, 13 articles vs. a Venezuelan prison riot sparked by two rival gangs, with 19 killed, 5 articles
The Foreign Office (FCO) has launched disciplinary action against a member of staff after a somewhat surprising headline appeared on its website today.
The announcement that the FCO has pledged an additional £2.2 million in funding to the World Service was titled: “Massive U-turn on BBC World Service funding”.
Obviously not the kind of language government departments normally clothe their massive U-turns in.
A spokesperson for the FCO said: “A web article with an incorrect and inappropriate title was up on the FCO website for 10 minutes this morning. That title absolutely did not represent the views of the FCO. This error has now been corrected and disciplinary procedures have been launched.”
Full Journalism.co.uk story on the World Service funding announcement at this link.
The vigil will take place at 1pm on the steps of the World Service building, Bush House.
Reports from the Tajikistan news agency Press.tj on 18 June, accused the BBC correspondent of being a member of banned Islamist group Hizbut-Tahrir.
According to the BBC, Usmonov was brought to his home by security agents and appeared to have been beaten up. The agents then searched his home and took him away.
The BBC has repeatedly called for Usmonov’s release, claiming that the accusations against him “represent a breach of legal practice and a serious violation of presumption of innocence”.
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.
