We’re all in the same broken boat: journalism needs your help more than ever
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Published in
5 min readFeb 3, 2017
edited by Marco Nurra
🔔 Pleased to announce our first +450 speakers #ijf17. All festival sessions are free entry for all attendees. Come and join us!
- A participatory graphic novel and 360 video documents the challenges facing kids in the Central African Republic. Photojournalist Marc Ellison is working on a graphic novel highlighting the challenges facing children in the Central African Republic. #ArtBeyondBorders is not his first reporting project of this kind, but it’s the first time he is encouraging readers to get involved in the reporting process.
🔔 Marc Ellison will be a #ijf17 speaker - Secret rules make it pretty easy for the FBI to spy on journalists. Rules governing the use of national security letters allow the FBI to obtain information about journalists’ calls without going to a judge or informing the targeted news organization.
- How easy is it to securely leak information to some of America’s top news organizations? This easy.
- Across the country, newsrooms are using crowdsourcing to cover immigration. While the refugee ban and protests at airports made news throughout the weekend, here’s how a few news organizations across the country told the stories of their immigrant communities.
- How can mainstream journalists dig deeper and find different ways into stories about American Muslim communities? It starts as any beat reporting starts — getting to know the main players in the community and talking to those already covering this issue. Ask American Muslim activists, leaders, scholars, imams, writers, artists, community organizers, and agitators what stories they want to see covered.
- For many journalists, Trump’s immigration ban is personal. Here is how media executives responded to it. And how the conservative media has reported it.
- White House ices out CNN. Trump administration refuses to put officials on air on the network which the president has called ‘fake news.’
- Should journalists protest in Trump’s America? Consider a Muslim journalist whose family may be impacted by the ban — can she join the airport demonstrations? Questions like these require open and honest discussion with higher-ups. Now more than ever, journalists need a safe, neutral space to talk through what’s happening, and a newsroom office is a better venue than social media.
- “Newsrooms are struggling to apply traditional ideas about objectivity to the current moment, and some journalists are being caught in the middle”, explained Laura Hazard Owen (Nieman Lab).
- How one reporter’s rejection of objectivity got him fired. Lewis Wallace has been fired after writing a post on Medium suggesting that journalists — especially those who are members of a minority group — need to rethink objectivity in the Trump era.
- What is the role of journalists and journalism during a time when the administration expresses hostility toward much of the media and shares “alternative facts”? Shutting up is not an option.
- The Turkish government is trying to shut down two journalists who left the country to publish their work. But they’re not giving up without a fight. Last week, journalists Can Dündar and Hayko Bağdat launched a website called Özgürüz that aims to publish independent journalism about Turkey from the relative safety of Germany. But just three days after Özgürüz was launched, the Turkish government blocked all access to the website in Turkey. Fortunately, Dündar and Bağdat have help getting around the ban.
🔔 Can Dündar will be a #ijf17 speaker - #PressOn campaign wants you to support facts by paying for journalism. If you were on Twitter on Wednesday, you might have seen lots of people tweeting with the hashtag #PressOn, imploring you to spend money on journalism. This campaign got some attention because it garnered the support of well-known people like Ben Stiller, Mariska Hargitay, Téa Leoni, Los Angeles Clipper J.J. Redick and Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors.
- Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has donated half a million dollars towards Wikipedia’s “Community health initiative,” aimed at reducing harassment and vandalism on the site and improve the tools moderators use every day to keep the peace.
🔔 Craig Newmark will be a #ijf17 speaker - Reddit’s /r/worldnews community used a series of nudges to push users to fact-check suspicious news. “We found a method that can invite a much wider readership into the work of dealing with this problem, and at scale.”
- Bots — good and bad — are responsible for 52 percent of web traffic, according to a new report by the security firm Imperva, which issues an annual assessment of bot activity online.
- Is ‘fake news’ a fake problem? The fake news audience is tiny compared to the real news audience–about 10 times smaller on average. Online news audiences spent more time on average with real news than fake news. Also, the fake news audience does not exist in a filter bubble. Visitors to fake news sites visited real news sites just as often as visitors to real news sites visited other real news sites. In fact, sometimes fake news audiences visited real news sites more often.
- Stop saying “fake news”. Far more people have been influenced by talk about fake news than by fake news itself, as Ethan Zuckerman pointed out.
“Yes, we should find a way to battle deceptive misinformation. But we need to work harder on building media that pushes us to see different perspectives and helps us understand the complex political reality we live in. The answer is not to fight fake news — it’s to build wide news, media that helps us understand people we disagree with and people we seldom hear from.”
- Fatigued by the news? Experts suggest how to adjust your media diet. The news ecosystem had changed drastically over the past five years, accelerating the sense of information overload.
- How do we design the news for people who are burned out? Taking a small break from the news is recommended by psychologists who study the negative health effects caused by constant bad news.
International Journalism Festival is the biggest annual media event in Europe. It’s an open invitation to interact with the best of world journalism. All sessions are free entry for all attendees, all venues are situated in the stunning setting of the historic town centre of Perugia.
