The NY Times’ Brian Stelter looks at global coverage of election protests in Iran:
“‘Check the source’ may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later. If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers.”
Further to our round-up of Demotix activity from Iran, here are two front pages from the New York Times, both featuring images from the pro-am agency’s contributors.
Demotix images have also been published by the Telegraph, El Pais, Wall Street Journal, ABC.es, and syndicated by Reuters, AFP and EPA to other outlets around the world.
“The bravery of our Iranian reporters has been astonishing. They are defying their government and risking their safety to tell their stories to the world, and we are delighted to be able to help them make their voices hear more loudly,” said Demotix commissioning editor, Andy Heath. “Demotix exists for moments like this.”
The Associated Press has signed a deal to distribute the work of of four non-profit journalism groups.
Work by the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica will be free for publication by the agency’s 1,500 newspaper members.
Jay Rosen, said that yesterday’s New York Times’ piece on the ‘truth-be-damned approach’ of Tech blogging ‘did not bother’ him.
Not so for fellow NY journalism professor, Jeff Jarvis. His Buzzmachine post on ‘Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture’ is currently doing the link rounds and has sparked a number of debates. For example:
Arthur responds:
“Flattered, I’m sure. Haven’t noticed your name in the letters pointing out what you think we should be covering; don’t know if you’ve commented on our many blogs (Tech, Games, PDA) that cover tech. We do have lots of insightful commenters (which I think is what you mean instead of ‘commentators’.)
“Hard to know quite what you want. For instance: TCrunch says Apple is going to buy Twitter. As soon as possible I point out, on the Guardian blog, why that’s absolutely not happening. It turns out it isn’t happening. Which is more useful?
“And I’ll also point out that when TCrunch does get it wrong, such as on Last.fm ‘passing data to the RIAA’ – a story denied by all sides, where it would be illegal for Last to pass the data (UK data protection act forbids) – TC deletes comments pointing that out. Do you really trust it?”
Now, might there be room for a response on that point? Come on, TechCrunch fight your corner!
Journalism.co.uk is quite enjoying its ringside view, but – on a side point – is there a neater way of viewing Twitter debates, than the links suggested by Jay Rosen?
Two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, have been sentenced to 12 years of hard labour in North Korea ‘in a case widely seen as a test of how far the isolated Communist state was willing to take its confrontation with the United States,’ the New York Times reports.
“Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee were on a reporting assignment from Current TV, a San Francisco-based media company co-founded by Al Gore, the former vice president, when they were detained by the soldiers.”
An internal memo from the New York Times, obtained by Nieman Journalism Lab, confirms the appointment of Jennifer Preston as the title’s first social media editor.
“Jennifer will work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others to use social tools to find sources, track trends, and break news as well as to gather it. She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond,” says the memo to employees.
While Preston will work on developing best practice procedures for social media use at the Times, the memo is clear that this is a progressive issue: “[W]e all need to figure this out together,” it states.
Speculations of plagiarism were zipping round Twitter yesterday, following this blog post hosted on myTPM Blog. Visit Huffington Post for an explanation from New York Times’ Maureen Dowd.
Editor&Publisher does a good job of summing it up, at this link. Extract below:
“(…) by mid [Sunday] afternoon she [Maureen Dowd] she was on the hot seat for using a paragraph almost word-for-word from one of the most prominent liberal bloggers, Jost [sic] Marshall of Talking Points Memo, without attribution. Charges of ‘plagiarism’ ensued.
“By early evening, Dowd had admitted wrongdoing, in an email to Huffington Post, and said she wanted to apologize to [Josh] Marshall. She also said that the Times would issue a correction tomorrow – and the copy was changed in her column to attribute the line of thought to Marshall.
“She seemed to be suggesting, however, that she had merely heard the line of argument from a friend, who did not attribute it to Marshall. This wouldn’t explain, however, why the rather lengthy sentence, a full paragraph, matched Marshall’s writing virtually word for word.”
“Another day, another high-profile Twitter (Twitter reviews) account gets hacked. This time, it’s one of (many) New York Times’ Twitter accounts, The Moment, which brings news from their fashion blog of the same name,” Mashable reports. Source: https://wownesia.com
Towards the end of this article – which looks at the key players interested in backing/investing in the New York Times – is a comment from the company’s spokeswoman Catherine Mathis: the paper is considering charging for some of its internet site.
“Our goal is to add substantial new revenue from our users without materially affecting the growth of our industry-leading online display advertising business,” she said.
A new charging system for the WSJ was announced this week and tweets from the New York Times suggested a similar move could be made.
A detailed look at how the New York Times’ reporting staff use Twitter and social media – and a great overview of the many benefits that social media use can bring journalists.