Diversity and inclusiveness, journalists under threat, source protection, and fake news

Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

edited by Marco Nurra

🔔 Pleased to announce our first 500+ confirmed #ijf18 speakers. All festival sessions are free entry for all attendees. Come and join us!

• New report shows lack of progress for women of color in the media. “Women of color represent a substantial proportion of the population, and yet their stories are too rarely told and their voices too infrequently heard on most media platforms.”
  🔔We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18 with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Minelle Mahtani, Cigdem Toprak and Hani Yousuf
  🔴 Her Story. Are we giving non-white women journalists enough agency to report on the stories they believe in?
• 7 resources to make your stories more inclusive. Recognizing the importance of redressing any unintended bias, this is a short list of available resources to help journalists and newsrooms easily access more diverse and inclusive sources, images and language.
• How Politico is championing empowerment through its Women Rule project. As the franchise comes to Europe, Carrie Budoff Brown, editor of Politico, explains why discussions about women in business and politics are needed now more than ever.
• Turkey sentences 25 journalists to jail for ‘coup links’. Twenty-three of them were convicted of membership of an armed terrorist organisation and were given prison terms of up to seven and a half years. Two were convicted on lesser charges. More than 50,000 people were arrested and 150,000 sacked or suspended from their jobs in the aftermath of the failed coup on 15 July 2016. Police, military personnel, teachers and public servants were among those ensnared in the crackdown.
  🔔We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18 with Yavuz Baydar, Marta Ottaviani, Sarphan Uzunoglu, Servet Yanatma, Stefan Candea, Zeynep Sentek and Craig Shaw
  🔴 Searching for online media business models in Turkey
  🔴 How can journalism networks help investigations under authoritarian regimes? Case study: Turkey
• Prosecutors in Cairo requested a death sentence for photojournalist Mahmoud Abou Zeid, an Egyptian photojournalist known as Shawkan who has been held for four and a half years. In almost 5 years of pre-trial detention, zero evidence presented to prove his guilt. His detention breaks international law, the UN says.
• “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.” Maltese journalist Matthew Caruna Galizia on the assassination of his investigative journalist mother, threats to the free press, and a new investigative outlet in Malta.
• Journalist Jay Solomon lost his job as a foreign correspondent with the Wall Street Journal after being targeted by hackers who were likely state sponsored. He writes his side of the story for the Columbia Journalism Review and he acknowledges errors in his source relationship. “Hackers — likely state-sponsored — went after me, I believe, to hurt one of my sources and throw me off the Iran story, which dominated my career for nearly a decade. My mistakes gave those hackers and their employers the ammunition they needed to end my career at the Journal.”
  🔔We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18 with Loic Dachary, Jean-Philippe Foegle and Veronika Nad:
  🔴 Protecting sources when national security is involved
• Government regulation on fake news is unlikely to prevent malicious actors from meddling in our elections or polarising our societies. “While one should not take lightly the efforts made by foreign powers to interfere in domestic politics, it is just as important to remain vigilant about threats to free speech and freedom of the press.”
• We need to get better at covering studies about fake news. “Too often the evidence that is starting to trickle out from academia is being trivialized and distorted. Simplified, then exaggerated,” writes Alexios Mantzarlis.
  🔔 Alexios Mantzarlis will be a #ijf18 speaker at the following events:
  🔴 Critical perspectives on the disinformation discussion
  🔴 Is the problem of fake news overblown?
• Should satire be flagged on Facebook? A Snopes debunk sparks controversy. Fake news sites often claim they’re satirical, only to fabricate entire stories without a semblance of humor or irony — all the while profiting off clicks. But at the same time, it’s hard to imagine how someone could take a washing machine designed to spin the news as anything other than a joke. Snopes justified debunking it by saying in its article that “some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally.”
• Living in a sea of false signals. BuzzFeed’s fake-news reporter Craig Silverman outlines some of the dangers ahead: “We have a human problem on our hands. Our cognitive abilities are in some ways overmatched by what we have created.”
  🔔 Craig Silverman will be a #ijf18 speaker
• Membership as a force multiplier for beat reporting. “Just published a ‘concept paper’ for an idea I have been trying to introduce for 11 years. It may take 11 more but I don’t care. I think it’s a good idea,” writes Jay Rosen.
  🔔 Jay Rosen will be a #ijf18 speaker at the following events:
  🔴 Optimizing journalism for trust. #ijf18talk by Jay Rosen
  🔴 Can journalism hold platforms accountable?
  🔴 Confronting rising global threats from “f*ke news” to censorship, surveillance, and the killing of journalists with impunity
  🔴 How can you have no ads, no branded content, no subscribers and still thrive?
• The New York Times tech columnist ‘unplugged’ from the Internet. Except he didn’t: he just said he did.
• The benefits of using voice-controlled devices for news distribution. Smart speakers have had a fast adoption rate, but are they a good vehicle for news delivery and storytelling?
  🔔We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18 with Max Amordeluso
  🔴 Voice news: the consumption of news in the age of AI and vocal assistants