• The use of open-source intelligence is becoming a common approach to human rights reporting in uncovering crimes against humanity. Last month, the human rights organization Amnesty International revealed the exact location of a mass burial site on the outskirts of Bujumbura, Burundi. It allegedly held the bodies of at least 50 people who died from political violence in December of last year. International media outlets like The New York Times, Reuters, and Foreign Policy were quick to report on the site’s importance, saying it adds to the growing evidence of atrocities, including murder, violence, and gang rape committed by the Burundian security forces.
  🔊 We’ll tackle this topic at ‪#‎ijf16‬:

📅 “Ever stronger voices in crisis reporting: NGOs, think tanks, foundations”, with Rachael Jolleyeditor, Jean-Paul Marthoz, Wilfried Ruetten, Gabriella Stern and Andrew Stroehlein

• The wall erected by Greece on its border with Turkey was the catalyst for journalists to start The Migrants’ Files; a collaborative, cross-border, data-driven project that helps to put the European migration crisis into perspective. The project’s records show that more than 23,000 people have died since 2000. These numbers had quite some traction and allowed journalists to identify and measure trends.
  🔊 We’ll tackle this topic at ‪#‎ijf16‬:

📅 “Reporting on the refugee crisis”, with Lucy Marcus, Andrew Stroehlein, Georg von Habsburg and Stefan Wolff

• Yemen war: Saudi Arabia said Thursday its military coalition will scale down operations, an announcement that came as the death toll from an airstrike by the alliance on a market north of the Yemeni capital this week nearly doubled, reaching 119.
  🔊 We’ll tackle this topic at ‪#‎ijf16‬:

📅 “Yemen: the silent war”, with Laura Silvia Battaglia, Malachy Browne, Iona Craig, Abdurahman Hussain and Sara Ishaq

• Turkey has banned Facebook and Twitter on Sunday, after images from a car bombing in the Turkish capital were shared on social media, broadcasters CNN Turk and NTV reported.

• Should all research papers be free? Alexandra Elbakyan took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published. A shadow hanging over the case is the memory of the computer programmer and open access activist Aaron Swartz, who hanged himself in 2013 after federal prosecutors charged him with wire fraud and various violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after he downloaded millions of academic journal articles via an M.I.T. server. He was facing crushing financial penalties along with jail time, even though it wasn’t clear what he planned to do with the cache.
  🔊 We’ll tackle this topic at ‪#‎ijf16‬:

📅 “The Internet’s Own Boy: the story of Aaron Swartz”

📅 “The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the rise of free culture on the internet”, with Justin Peters and Fabio Chiusi

• Newsrooms embrace innovation, but not cultural change. As media entrepreneurs continue to develop new ways to tell stories, communicate information and engage the public, it’s worth considering what the future might look like for such innovations. Will they remain part of an exciting, but narrow, subculture of early adopters? Or will they be implemented more broadly across the industry?

• 2016 will be critical for growth of VR in journalism, according to a new report from the Knight Foundation. In terms of storytelling in journalism, Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine, explained the potential power of VR in an interview with Consumer Reports:

“We first got interested in virtual reality when we saw a refugee camp film made for the U.N. We showed it to some people around the newsroom, and they were just blown away. Hardened editors on the international desk would take off the headset and say, ‘Listen, I’ve edited hundreds of stories about refugees, and I’ve never had an experience like this one.’”

• The Washington Post is trying to make it easier to read long articles. In a feature that came out this week, the Post introduced a number of tools that let readers bookmark their place in a story and come back to it.
• Are analytics changing newsrooms? Interview with Federica Cherubini.
  🔊 Federica Cherubini will be ‪#‎ijf16‬ speaker:

📅 “The use of audience data and metrics in newsrooms”, with Federica Cherubini, Sebastian Horn, Renée Kaplan, Rasmus Nielsen, Aron Pilhofer

• The Financial Times on Thursday launched a new newsroom analytics tool that’s meant to make audience data more accessible to its journalists.
• The Guardian published on Monday their guidelines about how to pitch an article to Guardian Opinion.
• Martin Belam wrote an article for the Guardian about the technical and design history of Comment Is Free which was founded ten years ago.
• After two major front-page errors in a six-month period, New York Times editors are cracking down on the use of anonymous sources.

“At best, granting anonymity allows us to reveal the atrocities of terror groups, government abuses or other situations where sources may risk their lives, freedom or careers by talking to us. In sensitive areas like national security reporting, it can be unavoidable. But in other cases, readers question whether anonymity allows unnamed people to skew a story in favor of their own agenda. In rare cases, we have published information from anonymous sources without enough questions or skepticism — and it has turned out to be wrong.”

• Reimagining the role of a public editor. In late February, the public editor of The New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, announced that she would soon be leaving to become the media columnist at The Washington Post. The following is an open letter to the leadership of The New York Times from Mike Ananny, assistant professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, asking them to radically reconsider the role of the Public Editor.
• Kurt Gessler, Deputy Editor for Digital News Chicago Tribune, provides some Twitter tips for media institutional accounts. “Twitter is both conversation and service.”
• Guardian Media Group to cut 250 jobs in bid to break even within three years. The publisher says it hopes the cuts, which include a target of 100 editorial roles, will all be voluntary.