Journalism in the Arab world after Khashoggi’s murder, news inequality, and the ‘new’ WikiTribune
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Stay up to date by following our Telegram channel or by subscribing to our Newsletter, and join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Published in
3 min readOct 26, 2018
edited by Marco Nurra
- How Khashoggi’s murder impacts Saudi journalists. There is a renewed sense of urgency among Saudi journalists to think through what Khashoggi’s killing will mean for practicing honest journalism in the Arab world.
- How ‘loyal’ Arab media echoed the Saudi line. Riyadh’s financial clout among the Arab media helped the kingdom get favourable coverage of the Khashoggi affair.
- Don’t let my friend Jamal Khashoggi’s death be for nothing. “The courageous Saudi journalist believed in democracy. Let this be a tipping point in how the world deals with despots.”
- In Jair Bolsonaro’s new Brazil, far-right evangelical billionaire Edir Macedo’s media empire is being exploited to investigate journalists — including The Intercept.
- Who gets good news? Apparently not the poor… At least for the UK, a new study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has now found that news is even more unevenly distributed than income. According to the authors, Antonis Kalogeropoulos and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, poorer people consume significantly less news than wealthier people.
- The worrying state of journalism in post-Soviet countries. “Only in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia are media ‘partially free’, although even here media freedom is fragile.”
- Breitbart News threatens Sleeping Giants with a lawsuit. In November of 2016, a Twitter account called Sleeping Giants appeared and gained notoriety. It named — and publicly shamed — advertisers whose ads were running on Breitbart News. According to some estimates, the Sleeping Giants campaign has been extremely effective in persuading advertisers to cut ties with the site. Now Breitbart is fighting back.
- Younger generations are actually better at telling news from opinion than those over age 50. Based on a survey Pew conducted in February and March, Americans ages 18–49 were more likely to accurately categorize factual statements as facts and opinion statements as opinions.
- WikiTribune is handing the keys more completely to its users (after laying off its journalists). “Effectively, what we are doing is inverting completely how people normally think about communities and journalists — the community is not here to merely help the journalists. Rather the journalists will be here to work for the community.”
- How Facebook deals with misinformation, in one graphic. In light of the ongoing confusion, Poynter created a simple flowchart showing what Facebook does and doesn’t do to limit the spread of misinformation on the platform.
- Facebook is now down-ranking stories with false headlines. “We’re always soliciting feedback from our fact-checking partners, and as we see new gray areas that warrant clarification of our program we try to address those with updated guidance and processes,” Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson told Poynter in an email.
- What do newspapers lose when they use non-professional photography? Photojournalists have not fared well in recent years. In some newsrooms, entire photojournalism staffs have been eliminated.
- The Economist’s print edition launches a dedicated data journalism page for better visual storytelling. ‘Graphic detail’ will publish stories through charts, maps and infographics in the magazine.
Did you miss any #ijf18 sessions? No problem! Our video platform provides videos of all 2018 festival sessions. Plus an archive of all sessions from previous festivals back to 2013. Here you can find some recommendations.