The unbearable lightness of Internet, paywalls, and transparency as new objectivity

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

edited by Marco Nurra

But first of all, we’re ready for a new edition. Are you? Would you like to be a #ijf18 volunteer?

• The internet isn’t forever. Is there an effective way to preserve great online interactives and news apps? So many pioneering works of digital journalism no longer exist online, or exist only as a shadow of their former selves.
• Publishers are seeing real performance gains from Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles (but $$$ remains a question mark). Questions remain about the true impact of the efforts on publishers’ audience and ad revenue. While these efforts are fulfilling many of their technical promises, there’s still concern about just how sustainable they’ll be.

• Facebook’s about to launch its news subscriptions initiative. The New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal owner News Corp are reportedly out; The Washington Post, The Economist, Tronc and Hearst are in.
• In a paywall age, free content remains king for newspaper sites. They explained the goals of the “leaky” paywall with unlimited “side doors”: data gathering, promotion, and a continued central role in the public conversation.

• Journalists, you are what you tweet. Used to its best effect, Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool for journalists to share their work, amplify their reach, and even crowdsource reporting. But with great power of a massive interactive soapbox comes great responsibility, and as countless cringeworthy examples prove, Twitter can be a minefield, with reputational and legal risks for individuals and newsrooms.
• Transparency is the new objectivity. Authority and trust will only return if reporters share some of the messy sausage-making process with the audience.
• No jail time for blogger who refused court order to identify sources. Check out how this judge balanced a blogger defying a court order to reveal sources vs. right to keep them secret:

The press has legitimate, essential, and beneficial reasons for gathering and disseminating information from confidential sources, particularly concerning persons in power and those who hold positions of public trust. The claim that confidential sources were promised confidentiality related to the articles in dispute is credible. The refusal by the defendants to comply with Judge Kelly’s directives is willful in the sense that it involves a conscious decision to disobey a court order. It is willful in that the defendants have a true choice, as discussed above. This is not a situation, however, where the defendants are ignoring the court. The refusal is based on articulated reasons, components of which deal with difficult, but very real and important decisions associated with the use of confidential sources.

• The fight against online harassment of female journalists. How to handle online abuse; some tips for newsrooms.

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.