Last week Gawker asked readers to help it translate an article into Russian from Conde Nast’s GQ, which the publisher reportedly went to great lengths to prevent from being read in Russia, because it contained criticisms of Vladimir Putin.
A full translation of the article has been completed and the process behind it can be read about at this link.
Issues of copyright and press freedom arise from this – Journalism.co.uk will be contacting Gawker to find out more.
Russia’s supreme court has cancelled the retrial of four men accused of involvement in the murder of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and ordered prosecutors to begin a new investigation, reports the New York Times.
Journalism.co.uk is trialling a new service via the Editors’ Blog: a daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site.
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On the Editors’ Blog:
TV reporter Jeroen Akkermans is taking Russia to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over the country’s attach on the Georgian city of Gori last August.
Akkermans joins a number of complainants in the case, which was originally brought by relatives of those killed in the attack.
Akkermans’ colleague Stan Storimans was killed while reporting from the Russian-Georgian border for RTL television.
via Dutch journalist takes Moscow to court | Radio Netherlands Worldwide.
(From last week via Adrian Monck’s blog) Russia’s leading news organisations are proposing draft legislation that would change the legal status of news reports to goods, with fines imposed for publication out of copyright.
“The main goal of the proposed amendments to a number of laws is to turn news into goods which must be paid for,” RIA Novosti editor-in-chief Svetlana Mironyuk said in the report.
Russia’s media landscape is beginning to address the issue of copyright breaches online – but will the country learn from the attempts of other states to tackle this problem?
This story appears to be only reported at MailOnline, (let us know if you spot it elsewhere), with 27 comments appearing under the story, to date.
Will Stewart reports that “a Russian journalist believes the level of surveillance is worse in ‘Big Brother Britain’ than it was in Russia during the Soviet era.”
“Irada Zeinalova, who is based in London, said she felt she was being constantly spied on by security cameras.
“She highlighted how in the UK the level of monitoring is such that even rubbish bins have computer chips fitted so councils can check what householders are throwing out.
“‘Security has got absurd,’ she said. ‘I don’t like that level of intrusion into my private life’.”
Metro International shares have plummeted on news of increased losses and a prospective bid falling through, but CEO, Per Mikael Jensen, remains optimistic.
“It was not a good quarter, but we could have done much worse,” Jensen told me, after the company posted grim financial news this morning.
Its net losses for the first quarter (Q1) of 2009 more than doubled compared to the same period last year, from 6.4 million euros to 15.3 million euros, and year-on-year net revenues decreased 24 per cent to 55.6 million euros from 73.4 million euros in Q1 2008.
The freesheet giant also announced that a mystery bid, which led the company to postpone seeking a rights issue to raise more capital earlier this year, had been stranded on the bidder’s inadequate financing arrangements.
The news caused Metro shares to fall sharply, but when I talked to Jensen, he professed to take comfort in the share doing better than before the bid emerged in February.
“I think people were calculating on a divestment,” he said, adding that he was not sure if the timing of the rights issue, which will now go ahead, would be any worse than two or three months ago.
In January, Metro shocked the market by closing its fully owned operation in Spain, which published the free daily newspaper Metro in seven Spanish cities, with immediate effect. However, in the last few months the company, which has 81 editions in 22 countries, has launched titles in Moscow and Mexico’s second city, Monterrey.
“It’s been our expressed strategy to grow in Russia, Asia and Latin America, markets that are not as mature as the European, for some time now,” Jensen said.
Read more about the consequences of the recession for free newspapers here.
“The three men accused of helping murder Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya were found not guilty on Thursday by a Russian court,” Reuters reports.
Follow this link for a Reuters timeline of the Politkovskaya murder trial.
The Guardian reports that “a fourth defendant, Pavel Ryaguzov, a lieutenant colonel in Russia’s FSB spy agency, was acquitted in a separate but related case”.
“In its 30th annual ‘The Best of Newspaper Design™ Creative Competition,’ the Society for News Design has named four newspapers from Europe and one from Mexico as ‘World’s Best-Designed Newspapers,™” the organisation’s website reports.
This year’s SND30 five top ‘World’s Best-Designed Newspapers™’ are:
After ruling that press and public would be banned from the courtroom for the Anna Politkovskaya murder trial, the Moscow military court has now said that the trial will be open after all, RSF reports. You can also follow Luke Harding at the Guardian. ‘We may actually see the judge firing himself,’ he reports in this this short audio clip.