U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich faced off with CNN's John King during the South Carolina debate Thursday, Jan, 19, accusing the "destructive, vicious, negative" media of making it "harder to govern this country," reported Politico. Following the debate, which King moderated, CNN’s David Gergen said on the air that Gingrich's anti-media rant represented "one of the harshest attacks that we’ve had on the press that I can remember in a long, long time,” Politico added.
According to Nieman Fellow Carlos Eduardo Huertas, columnist for the Colombian magazine Semana and founding director of the Consejo de Redacción (CdR), or Newsroom Council, today's newsrooms are caught between what journalism used to be, and what it can be in the future. Huertas, a participant in the second Spark Camp, held Jan. 13-15 in Austin, TX, spoke with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas about the importance of data journalism and computer assisted reporting.
For the third time in the past year, the Associated Press (AP) has updated its social media guidelines, this time to deal with correcting erroneous tweets and deleting tweets, as well as proper procedure for designating a re-tweet, according to a press release from the news agency.
With Wikipedia blacked out to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) anti-piracy bills in the U.S. Congress, news outlets like the Washington Post, NPR and the Guardian teamed up to use crowdsourcing via Twitter to try to serve as a make-shift encyclopedia, according to the Huffington Post.
In its first study of online journalism in Colombia, the Consejo de Redacción, or Newsroom Council, (CdR in Spanish) looked at who is producing online journalism in this South American country and how. The report found that since Colombia first connected to the Internet on July 4, 1994, online media have become "the protagonists of a quiet revolution in Colombia."
In protest of two Congressional bills that critics contend amount to censorship of the Internet, Wikipedia announced that it will go dark on Wednesday Jan. 18, reported The New York Times.
The World Press Institute (WPI) is accepting applications for the 2012 WPI Fellowship. The fellowship brings 10 print, broadcast, and online journalists from around the world to the United States for a nine-week program.
After Canadian Twitter users defied a decades-old ban by tweeting last year's election results before polls had closed throughout the country, the government announced Friday, Jan. 13 -- via Twitter, no less -- the repeal of the section of the Canada Elections Act that prohibits the broadcast or transmission of election results before all ballots have been cast, reported the Huffington Post Canada.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security regularly monitors dozens of websites, including Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks, YouTube, and even the New York Times Lede Blog, Global Voices Online, and the Blog del Narco, in order to "collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture," reported Reuters on Thursday, Jan. 11.
A military judge has recommended that Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of leaking classified military documents to WikiLeaks, face a court martial, reported the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, Jan. 12.