Category Archives: Investigative journalism

Alan Rusbridger on Coulson resignation: ‘This is not the end of the story’

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Editor in chief of Guardian News & Media Alan Rusbridger released a statement today following the resignation of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson from his position as director of communications for Downing Street.

Coulson said in his resignation statement the “continued coverage” of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World made it difficult for him to give the “110 per cent” needed for the job.

Rusbridger credited Coulson’s resignation to the work of Guardian reporter Nick Davies:

From the moment he revealed the secret pay-out to Gordon Taylor in July 2009 it was obvious that Andy Coulson’s position was untenable. But this is not the end of the story by any means. There are many outstanding legal actions, and uncomfortable questions for others, including the police.”

AP: New report faults Daniel Pearl murder investigation

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The four men imprisoned for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were not present at his beheading, according to a new report from the Pearl Project.

The report, the result of an investigation carried out by a team of US journalists and students and spanning more than three years, also accuses Pakistani authorities of knowingly relying on false evidence and ignoring important leads during the prosecution. It claims that US forensic evidence known as “vein-matching” points to al-Qaida commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to having killed Pearl after being arrested in connection with the World Trade Centre attacks.

Pearl was abducted in January 2002 while researching a story on Islamist militancy. In February a video of his execution was delivered to US officials in Pakistan.

Full story on AP at this link.

BBC News: Smoking out the illegal tobacco trade

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BBC investigative reporter Samantha Poling has spent several months secretly filming the UK’s counterfeit tobacco trade for a documentary due to be aired tonight.

A clip from the documentary shows Poling and her camera crew being threatened by tobacco dealers with a metal pole in Glasgow’s Barras Market.

Investigating criminal gangs like these ones always carry risks. And these are risks you have to add up.

Are they worth taking in order to get the footage, to get the story told?

After looking back at the hours of evidence I had recorded, and knowing the level of criminality we had discovered, which affects each and every one of us, I knew the answer.

Read Poling’s report here.

BBC Scotland Investigates: Smoking and the Bandits will be broadcast tonight at 7.30pm BBC One Scotland. It will be available on the BBC iPlayer for a week afterwards. In the future we will explore the new regulations for vaping in public places. The article will discuss how these regulations may affect your routine and what you need to know about them. Samantha Poling has previously investigated new vape regulations and this time she’s going to give us her opinion on if it’s good or bad news.

h/t: Jon Slattery

OUseful: New public data Q&A site launches

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Open University lecturer, self-proclaimed mashup artist and all-round bright spark Tony Hirst blogs about a new Q&A site designed to help people with open data questions.

GetTheData.org is in “startup/bootstrapping” phase at the moment but already has a fair bit of information up.

The idea behind the site is to field questions and answers relating to the practicalities of working with public open data: from discovering data sets, to combining data from different sources in appropriate ways, getting data into formats you can happily work with, or that will play nicely with visualisation or analysis tools you already have, and so on.

Full post on OUseful.info at this link.

h/t: Online Journalism Blog

edwalker.net: How we used cached Google pages to track down norovirus victims

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Some nifty advice from Media Wales online communities editor Ed Walker, who has a blog post up on using cached Google pages to dig up deleted information. Walker was trying to find out who had been staying at a Cardiff hotel during an outbreak of the norovirus.

Who were these 100 people? What was it like having the bug? It was a Friday afternoon when this broke and with despair we called the hotel but got nothing. The council would only confirm the dates when it happened and how many people were being treated. So, I pulled out my Google search terms and set about finding out who could have contracted the norovirus.

Full post on edwalker.net at this link.

Norwegian newspaper claims to have access to full trove of WikiLeaks cables

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An Oslo-based newspaper has reportedly gained full access to WikiLeaks’ trove of more than 250,000 secret US embassy cables.

An article published today on Views and News from Norway (VNN), “WikiLeaks experiences leak itself”, claims that Aftenposten has possession of all the documents, despite WikiLeaks’ strategy of drip-feeding them on its own website and through select media partners.

WikiLeaks has only published 1,862 cables so far out of 251,287, according to its dedicated embassy cables site but according to VNN, Aftenposten news editor Ole Erik Almlid told Norway’s main business newspaper Dagens Næringsliv: “We’re free to do what we want with these documents…We’re free to publish the documents or not publish the documents, we can publish on the internet or on paper. We are handling these documents just like all other journalistic material to which we have gained access.”

Full story at this link…

#cablegate: Newspaper editors on their part in the WikiLeaks cables release

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The Guardian has published a series of editorials from the editors of the newspapers who have worked alongside the Guardian in publishing parts of WikiLeaks’ latest release, the cables sent by US embassies across the globe.

George Mascolo, editor-in-chief, Der Spiegel

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/10/wikileaks-cables-spy-hunt-germany

Bill Keller, executive editor, the New York Times: “The reader response has been huge. Millions of page views.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/10/wikileaks-cables-new-york-times

Sylvia Kauffman, executive editor, Le Monde: “The arguments against us didn’t last long – people soon accepted this wasn’t totalitarian absolute transparency but that we had been selective in what we published.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/10/wikileaks-cables-french-reaction-diplomacy

Javier Moreno, editor-in-chief, El Pais: “All in all, it’s been the biggest story I’ve had in my five years as editor of El País, without any doubt. And measured by its international impact, it’s probably the biggest story this newspaper has ever been involved with.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables-huge-impact-spain


Video: I would have published leaks, says Harry Evans

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Veteran journalist Sir Harry Evans, the former Sunday Times editor who presided over many controversial investigations by the newspaper, including the Kim Philby espionage case, said this week he would have published the WikiLeaks embassy cables.

He was critical of WikiLeaks though, which he said had not done a responsible job with redacting their leaks.

The full video, courtesy of the 92nd Street Y, New York.

Original post at this link.

#cablegate: WikiLeaks essential to a strong media, Assange argues in new op-ed

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Just hours after the arrest of Julian Assange in London, the Australian has published an op-ed piece by the WikiLeaks founder in which he places the organisation squarely among the media firmament:

“Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media”, argues Assange. “The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.”

The piece begins with a quote from a young Rupert Murdoch, who said in 1958: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.” A particularly poignant statement, given that WikiLeaks is now in the fight of its life: trying desperately to stay online amid sustained cyber attacks; facing possible prosecution under any law the US attorney general can find to fit the bill; and press coverage of the leaks diverted by the arrest of its founder and editor-in-chief for alleged sex crimes.

The attacks on WikiLeaks have come thick and fast from many fronts, but, as Assange points out in his op-ed, the newspapers that published secret diplomatic cables by its side are not suffering anything like the same treatment:

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain’s the Guardian, the New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables. Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes.

Assange goes on to claim that his organisation has coined “a new type of journalism”, which he calls “scientific journalism”.

We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

His call for journalism to adopt something more akin to a scientific method are not new. It echoes comments he made back in July, prior to the release of Afghanistan and Iraq war logs and the US embassy cables:

You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results, that should be the standard in journalism. You can’t do it in newspapers because there isn’t enough space, but now with the internet there is.

As he has done for many years in defence of his own organisation, Assange raises the issue of the Pentagon Papers as he closes his piece:

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

See the full article on the Australian at this link…