The shooting that marked the deadliest day for US journalism since 9/11 (via CNN)

Dangers of being a journalist, distrust in mainstream media, and how news outlets are joining forces

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edited by Marco Nurra

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• An unwelcome reminder that journalism is difficult and dangerous work. The tragic news out of the Capital Gazette Newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, on Thursday serves as a devastating reminder that journalism is difficult and dangerous work, performed in service to a greater good. Journalists risk their lives as they hold the powerful accountable and uncover the truth. So far this year, 29 journalists have been killed around the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Since 1992, 1,306 journalists have been killed, according to CPJ.
• CPJ Safety Advisory: covering elections in Mexico. On July 1, Mexico will hold elections for the presidency and congress, as over 3,400 local and state offices in 30 of Mexico’s 32 states are contested. More than 100 candidates and incumbents have been killed during the electoral cycle.
• Russia charges independent journalist with terrorism offenses. Russian journalist Viktor Korb on May 16 was charged by authorities in the Russian town of Omsk, in southwestern Siberia, for transcribing and publishing a 2015 speech that a Kremlin critic gave at his trial. Korb on June 26 told the Committee to Protect Journalists that he remains unable to work and access money, and is barred from leaving Omsk, his hometown.
• Behind the scenes of a murder investigation that mobilised 230 journalists all over Brazil. Almost 60,000 people were murdered in Brazil last year. To put this number into perspective, around 25,000 were murdered in Mexico and 18,000 in the US. The motives behind the huge amount of killings in Brazil are often unknown and the many victims forgotten all too quickly. To see what’s driving the violence, humanise the data, and appeal to the government for action, G1 journalists teamed up with a university and an NGO to embark on a huge, nationwide investigation into the deaths: Monitor da Violência.
• News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents by the U.S.. BuzzFeed News, ProPublica, The Intercept and Univision announced Wednesday that they are partnering to gather vital information about the children in immigration detention facilities and shelters. Joining the effort: a leading Mexican news site, Animal Político, the Guatemalan site Plaza Pública, and El Faro, from El Salvador.
• It’s time for the press to suspend normal relations with the Trump presidency. It sometimes happens in diplomacy that one country has to say to another: “This is extreme. We cannot accept this. You have gone too far.” And so it suspends diplomatic relations. […] Journalists charged with covering him should suspend normal relations with the presidency of Donald Trump, which is the most significant threat to an informed public in the United States today. That is my recommendation,” writes Jay Rosen.
• So you wanna be a journalist? The jobs picture is worse — and better — than you realize, writes Kyle Pope. “My parents, then political conservatives who watched Richard Nixon resign from office when I was 10, would justify my interests to their friends as such: ‘This is our son, Kyle. He wants to be a journalist. (Beat.) But he’s not like all of those other journalists out there.’ In fact, I wanted to be exactly like all of those other journalists out there and would spend the rest of my working life making it so.”

• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory points to a media failure that keeps repeating. Former executive editor Jill Abramson reacted strongly to a headline on Tuesday’s home page that asked (with more than a hint of reasonable appeal to the search engines), ‘Who is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?’

• I want to believe in journalism. But my faith is waning, writes danah boyd. “At the end of the day, if journalistic ethics means anything, newsrooms cannot justify creating spectacle out of their reporting on suicide or other topics just because they feel pressure to create clicks. They have the privilege of choosing what to amplify, and they should focus on what is beneficial. If they can’t operate by those values, they don’t deserve our trust. While I strongly believe that technology companies have a lot of important work to do to be socially beneficial, I hold news organizations to a higher standard because of their own articulated commitments and expectations that they serve as the fourth estate. And if they can’t operationalize ethical practices, I fear the society that must be knitted together to self-govern is bound to fragment even further.”
• Distrust in mainstream media is spilling over to fact-checking. “Fact-checkers have increasingly come under attack, facing accusations of bias and partisanship that the neutral journalistic format was supposed to avoid.”
• Facebook claims subscription test results are ‘promising’ so far, though still small. According to Facebook, people who saw subscription offers from publishers in Instant Articles in May were 17 percent more likely to subscribe than those who just saw publishers’ standard mobile web links.