The Center for Public Integrity, a US non-profit investigative journalism organisation, will provide exclusive content to Newsweek and the Daily Beast as part of a new agreement announced this week.
The Center’s executive director William Buzenberg said in a statement today that the new deal is a “tremendous opportunity” for the organisation to provide its journalism to a new audience and get paid for its work.
Beet.TV will be live streaming its Online Video Journalism Summit from the Washington Post today.
The event kicks off at 9am local time and will include a chat with the Post’s political blogger Chris ‘The Fix’ Cillizza and panel discussions about the opportunities in online video news.
You can read more about the event here, follow the Twitter hashtag #beetmeet and watch the live stream on Beet.TV’s Livestream channel.
Fourth-quarter advertising revenues at UK publisher Newsquest were down 7.8 per cent year on year in 2010, while digital revenues were on the up, according to figures published by US parent company Gannett.
Gannett released its financial results for 2010 yesterday, including a detailed report of it’s fourth-quarter revenue.
The US company went on to describe Newsquest as “an internet leader in the UK”, claiming that its network of web sites attracted over 65 million monthly page impressions from approximately 8.8 million unique users in December.
You can read the full release from Gannett here…
Journalism.co.uk reported last week that staff at Newsquest titles in certain regions were understood to have been asked to take a week’s unpaid leave in response to “poor trading conditions”.
An internal Newsquest memo circulated in Wales, Gloucestershire, and the South Midlands said that revenues are “considerably below last year’s performance” and therefore action needed to be taken “to drive revenues and control costs sooner rather than later”.
Financial Times editor Lionel Barber accused Fleet Street of being ruled by a ‘conspiracy of silence’ over the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, and said it was because of other newspapers being involved in the so-called “dark arts”.
Barber was giving the Hugh Cudlipp lecture last night at the London College of Communication.
Below is an excerpt from his 5000-word speech, a full version of which can be found here.
The phone-hacking scandal marks a watershed – not just for News International but also for tabloid journalism. True, the practice of phone-hacking was widespread (and not only among the tabloids). The Information Commissioner’s report in 2006 showed that 305 journalists used private investigators. The number may well have been higher. And yet, beyond the conviction of one News of the World journalist and one private investigator, the infamous Glenn Mulcaire, no serious action was taken against them; not by the police, not by the courts, and not by the Press Complaints Commission.
The PCC was supine at best. And while the Metropolitan Police has now re-opened its inquiry, many questions remain about why it did not pursue the original News of the World investigation with sufficient rigour.
Most important of all, the newspaper industry itself did not take the issue seriously or seek to establish the truth. Indeed, aside from the lead taken by the Guardian, which was followed by the FT, BBC and Independent, the rest of the newspaper industry took a pass on the News of the World phone-hacking story – almost certainly because they too were involved in “dark arts”.
Yesterday the Press Complaints Commission announced it was setting up a phone-hacking review committee to draw together the lessons learned as a result of the outcomes of the relevant police inquiries and ongoing legal actions in the phone hacking case.
The Metropolitan police are currently investigating the use of phone hacking by the News of the World after reopening the case earlier this month.
If you’re a whistleblower and you have information that’s important, we will accept it, we will defend you and we will publish it.
This was the message from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an interview on CBS News’ 60 Minutes, where he also insisted that the US does not have the technology to take the WikiLeaks site down.
Just the way our technology is constructed, the way the internet is constructed. It’s quite hard to stop things reappearing. So, we’ve had attacks on particular domain names. Little pieces of infrastructure knocked out. But we now have some 2,000 fully independent in every way web sites, where we’re publishing around the world.
In the interview, Assange also challenges the idea that WikiLeaks goes after certain parties.
We don’t go after. That’s a bit of a misconception. We don’t go after a particular country. We don’t go after a particular organizational group. We just stick to our promise of publishing the material that is likely to have a significant impact.
He also defended the organisation’s harm minimization process, although admitted that “it is absolutely impossible” to say that nothing WikiLeaks ever publishes will result in harm.
Earlier today it was reported that connection to the internet in Egypt, where anti-government protests have being taking place, has been cut.
We spoke to Carine Torbey, a journalist with BBC Arabic, to find out how the broadcaster is keeping up to date with events from inside Egypt. She talks in the audio player below about how comments from those outside the country and more traditional forms of reporting are keeping the story alive, and the impact of the internet blackout on the flow of user-generated content.
According to paidContent, News Corporation’s new iPad publication, the Daily, will be launched on 2 Feb, a little later than previously rumoured.
An invitation sent out yesterday by News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch revealed that the Daily will be launched at the Guggenheim museum in New York.
Steve Jobs, now on medical leave, was to appear with Murdoch at the launch. Instead, iTunes guru Eddy Cue will represent Apple. One thing hasn’t changed: as James Murdoch affirmed earlier this week, subscriptions to the News Corp iPad ‘paper’ will run 99 cents weekly.
The BBC apologised today for not putting phone-hacking related allegations against the News of the World, reported by the BBC this morning, to the tabloid.
The broadcaster claimed yesterday to have obtained legal documents which suggest hacking by News of the World journalists may have been going on as recently as last year.
The News of the World earlier today accused the BBC of running a “misleading report”.
We have carried out an extensive investigation led by a team of independent forensic specialists and we have found no evidence whatsoever to support this allegation.
The civil litigation is ongoing, as is the internal investigation and until both are concluded it would be inappropriate to comment further. However we are disappointed the BBC chose to lead with this misleading report without giving the News of the World an opportunity to respond.
In a statement, the BBC said it stands by the story but “acknowledge that we should have put the allegations directly to the News of The World and have apologised to them for not doing so”.
We have carried their subsequent press statement on all outlets covering the story.
The New York Times is to publish its first e-book on Monday, which will take a look at WikiLeak’s activities lin 2010.
“Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy,” includes an introductory essay by the newspaper’s executive editor Bill Keller, where he explains the paper’s role in the release of documents. An excerpt of that can be found here.
It will also include profiles of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and analyses from NYT correspondents of the documents in the book, which will reprint the full text of all the cables and war logs published on the NYT’s Web site, as well as an additional 27 cables selected for the book.
The e-book will be available from Monday (31 January) and an excerpt of Keller’s essay will be published in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, his first piece as columnist for the magazine.
Earlier this month the Guardian announced it would be publishing its own book detailing its partnership with Assange.
Our reporter Rachel McAthy is at the protests outside the BBC World Service offices this afternoon. Members of the National Union of Journalists are demonstrating against budget cuts announced today at the service which will result in the loss of 650 jobs as well as the closure of numerous language services.
Listen below to Mike Workman, the chair of the BBC World Service branch of the NUJ, speaking at the protest:
More to follow…