WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief Julian Assange is in court today to fight extradition to Sweden on charges of rape, molestation and unlawful coercion.
The Guardian’s Simon Jefferies is live blogging the hearing.
Followers of the Guardian’s Egypt protests live blog in the last few days may have noticed short passages of Arabic text appearing amid the blog’s customary roster of updates, summaries and other multimedia.
Then later an entire news article or two appearing on the site in the unfamiliar language.
I spoke to blogs editor Matt Wells about the decision to translate the Guardian’s coverage into Arabic.
It began a few days back when one of the newspaper’s journalists suggested embedding Google’s translate button, which automatically translates any webpage, into the live blog. With independent news organisations such as Al Jazeera harassed by the state and foreign journalists reportedly suffering obstruction and detention, impartial Arabic-language news is not necessarily readily available in Egypt.
“The news there is dominated by state-run media,” Wells said, “and unofficial sources are mostly in English or under-resourced.”
Online translation services, however, are generally not very accuarate, even if Google has come a long way since the early days of Yahoo’s BabelFish.
The Guardian asked a native Arabic speaker in the office to take a look, and she confirmed that it “wasn’t exactly 100 per cent accurate”.
Then the blogs team put it to the readers, asking, what do you think of the Google translate service? We’ve had our native Arabic speaker cast her eye over it and don’t think it’s accurate enough.
Proving that reader comments aren’t the trash they get slated as by some, one reader joined the dots that the staff hadn’t.
If you have a native Arabic speaker, why don’t you translate some of it yourself?, they asked.
And so the Guardian started publishing live blog summaries in Arabic, and will be translating two or three news articles a day with the help of a professional service, Wells said.
“Clearly we are not going to become an Arabic news service, but we saw it as a useful feature.
“It is more of a gesture to our readers to show that we are appreciative of our audience in that region and of the fantastic response we’ve had.”
Wells said that the Guardian’s commitment to community management was key to the live blogging strategy, especially with coverage like that of the Egypt protests. The paper has two dedicated community managers – Laura Oliver and James Walsh – who sit and work with the news teams but “have the specific brief of engaging with readers in the comments below the line and on Twitter.”
That means flagging up useful information posted by users, pulling material into the live blogs from elsewhere and responding to comments or letting reporters know when it might be best for them to do so. It is a role that the Guardian is serious about developing, Wells said.
“It results in a much more engaged and two-way conversation with the users.”
As for the live blogging, there is no doubt that the Guardian likes, and does a lot of it. With more than 250,000 hits a day for the Egypt live blog alone, Wells called it the “centrepiece” of the paper’s coverage.
“This time it really feels like we’ve pushed on the form again.”
Clay Shirky, author and professor at New York University’s interactive telecommunications programme, has contributed to the Guardian’s Comment if Free with an analysis of WikiLeaks’ effect on the media and publishing environment.
WikiLeaks, as my colleague Jay Rosen points out, is a truly transnational media organisation. We have many international media organisations, of course, Havas and the BBC and al-Jazeera, but all of those are still headquartered in one country. WikiLeaks is headquartered on the web; there is no one set of national laws that can be brought to bear on it, nor is there any one national regime that can shut it down
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WikiLeaks has not been a series of unfortunate events, and Assange is not a magician – he is simply an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a much more general pattern, now spreading.
Arabic television network Al Jazeera has reported that its Cairo office has been attacked by “a gang of thugs”.
According to the network’s report, the office has “been burned along with all the equipment inside it.”
Al Jazeera’s Cairo office was reportedly shut down last Sunday, following the network’s coverage of protests in the country, with staff stripped of their press credentials and detained.
It has since reported interference with its coverage and, this morning, the replacing of a banner advert on its site by hackers with a slogan reading “Together for the collapse of Egypt”, which linked to a page criticising the broadcaster.
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According to the US Department of Defence spokesman Geoff Morrell, the DoD is “hard at work building a case” against Julian Assange. Any case they do build will likely be based on a prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act.
There have been some passing comments recently from the likes of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and New York Times editor Bill Keller about whether or not Assange is a journalist or not. Far from idle debate, or just semantics, the definition could prove key to defending himself against the US. ABC’s The Drum blog has the full analysis.
Well, why does it matter whether Assange is a journalist or not? It certainly might matter to Assange, because under the US Espionage Act it’s an offence for anyone to disclose information pertaining to America’s national security and which he “has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States”.
A journalist, the courts by and large accept, has an occupational motive for disclosing information that comes his or her way, more or less regardless of consequences. But if Assange isn’t a journalist, what is his motive? If it could be shown that his specific purpose, in passing the cables to newspapers around the globe, or in posting them on WikiLeaks’s own websites, was to injure the United States, he might be caught by the act.
The New Statesman’s Dan Hodges claims to have obtained an email sent on behalf of Ed Miliband’s director of strategy Tom Baldwin to all shadow cabinet teams.
The email reportedly
warns Labour spokespeople to avoid linking hacking with the BSkyB bid, to accept ministerial assurances that meetings with Rupert Murdoch are not influencing that process and to ensure that complaints about tapping are made in a personal, not shadow ministerial, capacity.
Journalist and computer scientist Jonathan Stray has posted an interesting breakdown of what he calls “computational journalism”, a kind of parent term for data journalism, visualisation, computational linguistics, communications technology, filtering, research and more.
I’d like to propose a working definition of computational journalism as the application of computer science to the problems of public information, knowledge, and belief, by practitioners who see their mission as outside of both commerce and government. This includes the journalistic mainstay of “reporting” — because information not published is information not known — but my definition is intentionally much broader than that.
Stray has put together a reading list under each sub-header (including our very own ‘How to: get to grips with data journalism‘).
Worth a read.
Last year we wrote about a personalised tablet news service being developed by Betaworks, the technology development company behind online services such as Tweetdeck and Bit.ly, and the New York Times.
TechCrunch’s Erick Schoenfield has been playing with an early version of the new app, called News.me, and has a preview up on the site.
Schoenfield is billing News.me as the NYT’s answer to the Daily, but it seems much more like social aggregation apps such as Flipboard, using Twitter and URL-shortener Bit.ly to pull in content.
When you first launch News.me, you see the welcome screen below with a few tutorial hints: Tap on the people along the top dock to see what stories are appearing in their Twitter streams, tap on a story headline or excerpt to read it full screen, or you can stretch a story open inside the stream with a reverse-pinch. This reverse-pinch is one of my favorite parts of the experience. You flick to scroll through the stream, and when you find something you like, you can open it up and read it without loading a new page.
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.
Jack Shenker – 13 articles (The Guardian), James Hider – 11 articles (The Times), Peter Beaumont – 10 articles (The Guardian), Roula Khalaf – 7 articles (Financial Times), Adrian Blomfield – 6 articles (Telegraph)
More from the Media Standards Trust:
The Media Standards Trust’s panel event ‘Libel reform: in the public’s interest?’ is available to watch on our website
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
There is a lot of so-called ‘noise’ on social media networks. A lot of stuff in general. But it is, at times, a great place to find leads or information about stories.
In part two of a series on “social searching”, Nicola Hughes of Data Miner UK has posted a useful guide to some of the tools you can use to cut through all the noise and find what you are looking for, including Topsy, Kurrently, socialmention, and Twitter’s advanced search options.
When you’re chasing something specific then go to Twitter’s advanced search. I’m not sure why it’s not in a more convenient place on the Twitter site itself. This gives you loads more options especially location, people and even language. By far and away the best resource for big breaking events.
See the full post on Data Miner UK at this link.
See part one – Social searching: what’s out there? – at this link