A new report from Europe takes aim at an insidious form of state censorship: the misuse of accreditation to journalists. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has issued the report through its media freedom office. The report’s purpose is to remind the 56 OSCE states that open and fair accreditation of journalists is part of their commitment to press freedom. The report is also a response to governments that have used accreditation to keep out independent voices and punish journalists who provide unfavourable coverage. One of the events that influenced the report was the May 2005 unrest in Andijan, Uzbekistan, where troops shot and killed an unknown number of protesters. In the weeks and months afterward, President Islam Karimov’s government revoked visas and accreditation of journalists who had tried to cover the crisis independently. The BBC was among the foreign outlets pushed out of the country afterward. Other states singled out in the report include Belarus, Russia, Turkmenistan, and the United States. The latter country in recent years has been enforcing a law requiring journalists to apply for an ‘I-Visa’ from the Homeland Security Department-and some have bee expelled for not having one. OSCE says the permit has an ‘unnecessary permissive character,’ writes International Journalists Network.
The OSCE report concludes the report with following recommendations for
• Accreditation should not be used as a general work permit for journalism, only
as facilitator of the work of journalists. Governments should facilitate the work
of journalists by adopting procedures that enable journalists to work in the host
country, including the timely issue of visas. Governments should abolish
regulations that pose a required further layer of permission to media
professionals
.
• Accreditation should not be the basis on which governmental bodies decide
whether to allow a particular journalist to attend and cover a public event.
Further, the threat of revocation of the accreditation for an event should not be
used as the means to control the content of critical reporting.
• Accreditation should not be the basis on which governmental bodies decide
whether to allow a particular journalist to attend and cover a public event.
Further, the threat of revocation of the accreditation for an event should not be
used as the means to control the content of critical reporting.
• Accreditation is the means to promote diverse reporting and should not be made
dependent on unrelated factors, such as education or training. Legislation that
has a permissive nature over the issuance of accreditation should be re-
examined in order to maintain pluralism in the press corp.
A court in the Danish city of Aarhus has rejected a lawsuit against the editors of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The court ruled that even if the text accompanying the 12 cartoons could be interpreted as mocking, it was going tono far to conclude that they were meant to be harmful or insulting to Muslims. The seven Muslim organisations which filed the lawsuit say they will appeal the ruling. The publication of the cartoons more than a year ago led to a storm of protest in may Muslim countries.
Today a Danish court demanded ISP’s to block access to the russian site www.allofmp3.com. Public Service Television, DR, had the story and did an interview with a user of the website who showed how easy it is to buy and download cheap music from the Russian site. He had some sharp comments on freedom of information and so on. Unfortunately the camera cought the entire download tray of the user. For several seconds the nation could see what the Internet user has been downloading this afternoon:
In a country where investigative journalism is all but extinct, a team of veteran Zimbabwean and international journalists have created an independent online news publication. The Zimbabwe Times.com launched on October 19. Veteran Zimbabwean journalist Geoffrey Nyarota initiated the site from the United States, with support from media professionals in Zimbabwe, South Africa, the United Kingdom. According to organisers, the site will provide in-depth investigations and analysis of events that are practically untouched by other news outlets in the country. A report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which was launched one year, to the day before The Zimbabwe Times.com was launched, found that hundreds of Zimbabwean journalists live in exile in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States where they work to continue investigative reporting. Exiled journalists often struggle to get accurate, investigative information due to resources, distance and government control inside the country, the report found. (International Journalists Network,October 24, 2006)
Iran’s press watchdog has shut down the new moderate daily Rozegar (’Times’) for resembling a newspaper with a similar stance that was banned last month, the student news agency ISNA reported. The conservative watchdog has banned Rozegar based on a press law that ‘immediately bans publication of a newspaper that replaces a banned one with similar name, logo, and format.’ Rozegar first hit the news stands October 16, nearly a month after the press watchdog shut down the leading moderate broadsheet Shargh (East). The format and typeset of Rozegar, a 24-page colour daily, closely resembled that of Shargh, for long the standard-bearer of the moderate press. Many of the bylines on the paper showed that its reporters were former Shargh journalists. The new paper had to suspend publication just two days after its first issue after receiving warnings not to cover political news and to change its format, according to the editorial board. With the requested changes made, Rozegar appeared again Saturday, removing its political news content from three pages.According to the culture ministry, the newspaper’s license does not allow it to publish political stories. (AFP, Middle East Times,October 24, 2006)
The complete works of one of history’s greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, are being published online. The project run by Cambridge University has digitised some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications - all of it searchable. Surfers with MP3 players can even access downloadable audio files. Dr John van Wyhe, the project’s director, has spent the past four years searching the globe for copies of Darwin’s own materials, and works written about the naturalist and his breakthrough ideas on natural selection. Images as well as texts are available online. There is no charge to use the website at darwin-online.org.uk. Most texts can be viewed either as colour originals or as fully formatted electronic transcriptions. There are also German, Danish and Russian editions. Users can also peruse more than 150 supplementary texts, ranging from reference works to contemporary reviews of Darwin’s books, obituaries and recollections. At the moment the site contains about 50 per cent of the materials that will be provided by 2009, the bicentenary of the naturalist’s birth.
 Now online, pod- and searchable.
The Kremlin’s campaign to improve Russia’s image on the international stage is to move up a gear with the multimillion-pound placing of upbeat ‘informational’ Russian supplements in national newspapers around the globe. Moscow says it is keen to correct what it sees as overly negative and outdated stereotypes about Russia, which it contends have long been peddled by the foreign media. The essence of its message is clear: the West and the wider world have nothing to fear from a resurgent Russia which doesn’t intend to use its energy reserves to bully other countries and is a reliable business partner. The first three countries to be targeted with what some commentators have labelled ‘propaganda’ will be Britain, the United States and China, with upbeat pull-out supplements due to appear in The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, and a Chinese daily on a monthly basis starting later this year. The project will be extended to cover a further nine countries next year and the supplements will appear indefinitely. The articles will be prepared by a special unit based in Moscow, attached to the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta. (The Independent,October 19, 2006)
The estranged founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written entirely by members of the public, is to launch a rival that he says is less likely to be riddled with errors. Larry Sanger says that vast swaths of the anarchic encyclopaedia he helped create in 2001 are in desperate need of an editor - and that is what he is promising for his new project. The launch of Citizendium.org, which begins testing in the next few days, is the latest chapter in the bitter public feud between Sanger and Jimmy Wales, with whom he conceived Wikipedia in 2001. And it comes as Wikipedia is still reeling from the revelation of embarrassing errors and the activities of malicious hackers. Sanger has begun signing up academics furious at the mistakes and generalisations they find on Wikipedia’s articles on their specialist subjects, and vowed to give these experts a special role to shape articles on Citizendium.org. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium will insist that members of the public making changes do so using their real names. It will throw out troublemakers and those who do not defer to expert editors. (The Independent,October 18, 2006)
Iran’s Islamic government has opened a new front in its drive to stifle domestic political dissent and combat the influence of western culture - by banning high-speed internet links. In a blow to the country’s estimated 5m internet users, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. The move by Iran’s telecommunications regulator will make it more difficult to download foreign music, films and television programmes, which the authorities blame for undermining Islamic culture among the younger generation. It will also impede efforts by political opposition groups to organise by uploading information on to the net. A petition branding the high-speed ban as ‘backward and unprincipled’ bearing more than 1,000 signatures is to be sent to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The telecoms regulator declined to explain the decision but said it was taken by ‘a collection of policy-makers’. However, Etemad, a pro-reformist newspaper, suggested it was part of an official campaign to stem a western ‘cultural invasion’. (The Guardian,October 18, 2006)
The European Commission said on Tuesday that it is taking Sweden to court for failing to abolish state-owned monopoly Boxer TV-Access as required by EU law. The European Union’s executive arm said it would lodge a case against Sweden at the European Court of Justice for not doing away with the company’s monopoly in access control services for digital terrestrial broadcasts. Since September 2002, EU members are required to ensure an open market for radio and television broadcasting. However, in contravention of EU rules, Swedish broadcasters using digital terrestrial networks have no choice but to go to Boxer to get access control services, which include encryption and decryption of TV-signals (pay-TV) and the provision of decoders, set-top boxes, smart cards and other devices. (The Local,October 18, 2006)
The Chinese government last week appeared to lift its block on the English-language version of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, an unexpected move that comes almost a year to the day when access was first denied. The Chinese-language site, however, remains blocked within China. Even days after word first spread on the Internet about the change in access, Wikipedia contributors and administrators in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong said they were trying to determine if any English-language articles were still being blocked. Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American in Beijing researching a book about Wikipedia, reported on his blog, that he could get access to many controversial subjects, but could not read the English-language article about the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989. (The New York Times,October 16, 2006)
You can read the story here (in russian, frontpage of today’s Novaya Gazeta, photo from Politkovskayas funeral:
Turkey’s leading writer and searing social commentator, whose refusal to shy from controversial aspects of his country’s past enraged conservatives at home, has confounded his critics by winning the world’s most prestigious literary prize. Orhan Pamuk, who had faced jail for referring to the suffering of Turkey’s Armenian population, has been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, a choice widely seen as motivated by achievements in the political sphere as well as by his literary output. Pamuk, whose novels My Name is Red and Snow gained plaudits worldwide for their skillful intertwining of Eastern and Western cultures, has long been praised for his courageous tackling of modern Turkey’s demons. He has gained a reputation as a leading defender of freedom of speech in a country with aspirations to join the EU but a track-record of silencing those who confront certain long-held national taboos. (The Independent,October 13, 2006)
Last week I wrote about my new tablet pc. I just had another great day on the road with it, and this time I tested a new type editor Google presented a couple of days ago: Google Docs. It is an easy to use web based word editor with all the functions you need to write and format an article. Features I like are:
- Auto save
- Wordcount (never seen that in web based editors before)
- HTML editor
- Post to blog (works on WordPress and a range of other systems)
- Save and open as word, pdf, Open Office, HTML etc.
- Easy sharing, up- download of documents.
- Starts faster than both Word XP and latest Open Office aps
- Hotkeys - like ctrl+s for bold, ctrl+s for save. Overrides browser defined hotkeys (in firefox)
Click to view a screenshot of google docs
To this comes a more advanced revisions feature, that lets you share the document with reviewers. Finaly you can publish the document by direct print, email or to an unique URL created by the editor. See my example here: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgt9dxxw_3f43fnx. Changes in document can be subscribed to via RSS :-)
Dispite the simple userinterface I can´t find anything missing exept from maybe danish spell checking (the English sucks byt the way, it won’t reconize the words: Google, pdf and blog) and a system for mass handling of docs. Would be cool if I could upload and publish 50 docs at the same time. Google Docs has been integrated in the Google Spreadsheet, released in 2005, so you handle both types of documents from the same interface and with the same tools.
The Committee to Protect Journalists will honour four journalists - from Colombia, Yemen, the Gambia and Iraq - with 2006 International Press Freedom Awards in November. The awards ceremony will also commemorate CPJ’s 25th anniversary. Jesús Abad Colorado of Colombia, Jamal Amer of Yemen, and Madi Ceesay of the Gambia have risked their lives to report the news, withstanding attacks, harassment, and imprisonment. CPJ will posthumously honour Atwar Bahjat, correspondent for Al-Arabiya satellite television and former Al-Jazeera reporter who was gunned down while covering a bombing near Samarra, Iraq, in February. Hodding Carter III, the respected newspaper editor, television journalist, foundation executive, and teacher, will receive CPJ’s Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for lifetime achievement. (Committee to Protect Journalists,October 12, 2006)
Italian TV show on drug-taking MPs pulled from schedules. A television programme that purports to show widespread drug use among Italy’s MPs was scrapped before transmission last night amid uproar over both the results and the methods used to entrap the politicians. In a classic sting operation some 50 politicians were fooled into thinking they were being interviewed about aspects of next year’s draft budget, currently before parliament. Instead, a make-up artist with a satirical TV show swabbed their eyebrows to get a sample of their perspiration, which was then tested for traces of cannabis and cocaine. Twelve allegedly tested positive for cannabis and four for cocaine, all apparently taken in the 36 hours before being approached. Although the 16 have not been named, Le Iene (The Hyenas), well-known for spoofs that embarrass public figures, was cancelled over claims that the privacy of the politicians had been invaded, reports Media Guardian.
Europeans now spend more of their week online than they do reading newspapers or magazines, according to a report. A Jupiter Research study of 5,000 people in western Europe found that time spent online has doubled to four hours a week in the past three years. However, the study found that new media was not cannibalising print and TV. Print consumption had stayed at its 2003 level of three hours per week, while TV usage had risen from 10 hours to 12 hours. The research also confirmed some well-established trends. It found that 15-24 year-olds spend most time online, with the figure gradually declining with age. The opposite is true for traditional print media, where time spent reading papers and magazines peaks with those over 65 years-old, and falls as people get younger. Jupiter also found that broadband users spend more than three times as many hours a week online as dial-up users. (BBC News,October 10, 2006)
Videos showing anti-immigrant party members mocking the Prophet Muhammad were pulled from websites Monday as two youths seen in the clips were reported in hiding and the Foreign Ministry warned Danes against travelling to much of the Middle East. Muslim clerics from Egypt and Indonesia condemned the video broadcast in Denmark last week showing members of the Danish People’s Party youth wing with cartoons of a camel wearing the head of Muhammad and beer cans for humps. A second drawing placed a turbaned, bearded man next to a plus sign and a bomb, all equalling a mushroom cloud. In a move aimed at defusing tension, the Danish Foreign Ministry met ambassadors from Muslim countries to discuss the video Monday. The clip was removed from the Danish public radio’s website Monday, as well as from the Nyhedsavisen newspaper’s site. (AP, ABC News,October 10, 2006)
More Denmark-Mohammad stuff
The founders of the video website YouTube last night accepted a USD 1.65bn (EUR 1.3bn) takeover offer from Google for their 20-month-old venture, which has a big online following but has yet to make money. Chad Hurley, 29, and Steve Chen, 27, who set up the site in a California garage, said they were attracted by the prospect of adding Google’s cutting-edge search technology to enable users to pinpoint clips more accurately. Under the deal, YouTube will remain a separately branded entity. Google will pay for the company entirely in shares. Hurley predicted that Google’s financial resources would help to build a business model able to attract media companies keen to publicise licensed clips and to avoid a possible mountain of copyright litigation. Around the world, people watch videos on YouTube more than 100m times daily. About 65,000 clips are uploaded on to the site every 24 hours and the monitoring agency Hitwise says YouTube accounts for 60 per cent of all videos viewed on the net. (Media Guardian,October 10, 2006)
The fifth free newspaper aimed at Danish readers hit the streets on Friday even though a glitch cut its planned print run by half. Nyhedsavisen was handed out at key traffic points and distributed directly to homes in Denmark’s major cities. Nyhedsavisen (The News Daily) had a planned circulation of 500,000 but half of them - intended for readers in the Danish capital - failed to be printed because of a technical problem. The newest daily arrived in an already saturated market where local media houses have vowed to keep the newcomer at bay. Berlingske Officin, which also publishes several other newspapers including one of Europe’s oldest dailies, Berlingske Tidende, came out first on Aug. 16 with tabloid-size dato (Date). A day later, rival media company JP/Politikens Hus followed with a paper of the same size called 24timer, or 24 hours. In late August, Metro International SA which has been distributing the free metroXpress in Denmark since 2001, quickly introduced a free afternoon newspaper in addition to its morning edition. Besides metroXpress, Denmark already has another free daily newspaper, Urban, published by the Berlingske Officin. (Editor and Publisher,October 09, 2006)
Shareholders of a Moscow-based newspaper whose well-known reporter was killed Saturday have offered RUB 25m (about EUR 740,000) for information that could help resolve the murder, a newspaper official said Sunday. According to police, Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered Saturday night in her apartment building in central Moscow. Vitaly Yaroshevsky, deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper, said the editor’s office received the offer by e-mail earlier Sunday from Alexander Lebedyev, a member of parliament who is among the newspaper shareholders together with former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Russia’s Prosecutor General Yury Chaika took Sunday the investigation into the killing of Politkovskaya, known for articles criticising Russian authorities’ actions in Chechnya, under his personal control. The investigation considers the journalist’s professional activity as one of the most probable causes of the crime. (Ria Novosti,October 09, 2006)
The internet giant Google is in talks to acquire the popular video sharing website Youtube, according to press reports. The Wall Street Journal reported that the search engine site was in sensitive discussions over a possible USD 1.6bn (EUR 1.2bn) buyout of the video site. Quoting sources familiar with the issue, the Journal claimed the talks could easily break down at any stage. Founded just 18 months ago in California, YouTube is believed to have held discussions with a number of different companies over a possible takeover - although the founder and chief executive, Chad Hurley, has previously said that it is not for sale. Many see the site, which has rocketed to be one of the world’s biggest and delivers more than 100m videos each day, as being ripe for acquisition. However, there are concerns over possible legal action, particularly after Universal, the world’s largest record label, last month publicly threatened to sue YouTube over copyright infringement. (Media Guardian,October 09, 2006)
Ms Politkovskaya, a reporter for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was found dead Saturday afternoon from a bullet wound in the elevator of the building where she lived in Moscow. Ms Politkovskaya was celebrated internationally for her critical coverage of the war in Chechnya. She was the 76th journalists killed world-wide in 2006, the most deadly year since records of journalist murders began in 1997.
Anna Politkovskaya
The websites of US newspapers are now attracting almost a third more visitors than they were a year ago, according to research on the rapidly evolving sector released Wednesday. Newspaper websites averaged more than 55.5m visitors a month in the first half of 2006, a 31 per cent increase over the 42.4m visitors over the same period a year ago, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The Newspaper Association of America represents more than 2,000 newspapers in the United States and Canada. The research, carried out by Nielsen/NetRatings found that more than one in three of all US Internet users were visiting newspaper websites. Surveys by Scarborough Research further found that newspaper websites had helped increase total readers - combining print and internet editions - by 15 per cent for 25- to 34-year-olds and 10 per cent in the 18- to 24-year-old age range.
Newspaper Audience Database fall 2006:
Audience Data:
Adage has build this impressing Media Family Tree, showing ownership and relationships among the top 100 media brands - thanks to Vassa eggen for leading me to it.
Click to download pdf. poster.
Search engine Google has launched a portal to connect literacy organisations around the world. The Literacy Project enables teachers, organisations, and those interested in literacy to use the internet to search for and share literacy information. The new online service (www.google.com/literacy/) was announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. Users can search for information in digitised books and academic articles, and share information through blogs, videos and groups. The tool also allows people to find literacy organisations around the world using a searchable and zoomable map. It has been created in collaboration with the Frankfurt Book Fair literacy campaign (Litcam) and Unesco’s Institute for Lifelong Learning. (BBC News,October 05, 2006)
The publisher of the Miami Herald resigned Tuesday, citing revelations that journalists in the group had been paid by the US government to help undermine Fidel Castro’s Cuban regime. Jesus Diaz Jr, who had been Herald publisher and president of the Miami Herald Media Company since July 2005, said in a letter to readers that he had ‘ambiguously communicated’ the group’s policy on journalists receiving payments from outside organisations. Tuesday’s resignation follows the news last month that several Florida-based journalists had been paid to work for the US-government-funded Radio and TV Marti, which broadcast programmes aiming to promote democracy in the communist state of Cuba. The Miami Herald itself reported that two staff journalists and a freelance contributor from its sister Spanish language title, El Nuevo Herald, were among those who received the payments to work for Radio and TV Marti, which is funded by the US Office of Cuba Broadcasting. All three journalists were fired after the story broke. (Media Guardian,October 04, 2006)
Got this today from WAN:
In their streets and on public transport, in their cars - and now directly to their homes. In the space of a few short weeks, Danes are being offered free daily newspapers, many of high quality, wherever they turn. An astonishing free news war has broken out in this Scandinavian market, which may well hold lessons for newspapers everywhere.
The World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum will turn their spotlight on this living laboratory of the free press concept at their 9th World Editor and Marketeer Conference & Expo, to be held on 23 and 24 November in Madrid, Spain (see http://www.wan-press.org/madrid2006 for programme details and registration).
It all began with the announcement earlier this year by the Icelandic group Dagsbrun that it would launch a quality free daily newspaper in the autumn and deliver it directly to 500,000 households. The move led Denmark’s biggest press groups to launch their own door-to-door free dailies and
beat the newcomer to the market. The Icelandic entry is scheduled to be launched this Friday, 6 October.
Det Berlingske Officin, which publishes the paid-for daily paper Berlingske Tidende and the free commuter paper Urban, launched the free paper Dato in August, delivering copies at traffic intersections in Copenhagen and direct to households in larger cities.
One day after the launch, JP/Politiken, which publishes Ekstra Bladet, Jyllands-Posten and Politiken, launched its own free daily, 24Timer, which is distributed daily to homes in Copenhagen, Arhus and elsewhere.
At the same time, Metro International launched an afternoon edition of its Metro Xpress, which had been the first free paper in the Danish market.
And, as if all this were not enough, local media companies around the country also joined the game with their own home-delivered free newspapers.
Poul Madsen, Editor-in-Chief of 24Timer, and Torsten Bjerre Rasmussen, the Director of the paper, will share their experiences in this newspaper war in a session on new newspaper trends at the Editor & Marketeer Conference.
They will be joined by Mark Rix, Deputy Managing Editor of the Manchester Evening News, who will examine a similar explosion of free newspapers in the UK market, including the decision of his own title to go free in the city centre and to sell the paper elsewhere, a unique combination.
More: http://www.wan-press.org/madrid2006
This is today’s second question: What software solution would be suitable for a small online newspaper?
The other day Stiofain (Ireland) asked me if I know of any platform for building a small online newspaper. He has been looking at www.bulletlink.com, but it is a bit outdated when it comes to design and web2.0 features. Another thing is that it is payware.
I have recently helped www.bizreport.com in a redesign process. Instead of bying publishing platform software they chose a free blogsystem, MoveableTypes, and build the website around that. The great thing is that you´ll have all the social features like comments, trackbacks, email stories directly to frontpage etc. build in. Another system I could think of when designing open source platforms for smaller news sites is Drupal. Here you can setup a range of special user accounts with different properties. This system will also allow your users to set up their own blogs: www.drupal.org (I guess http://www.mamboserver.com/ can do exactly the same things)
Like this blog, made with Wordpress, both drupal.org and Moveabel types are open source. These blog systems seems to be perfect for building news sites, but is there in any solutions made specially for small newspapers?
I was wondering: Most European countries have state owned television/radio channels to host public services. Does any European nation have a stateowned newspapers? I guess not, but how come?
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