In February, an organization which defends freedom of expression, Article 19, launched the Community Communication Observatory, an online platform which aims to increase the visibility of bureaucratic difficulties and legislative problems facing community media outlets in Brazil.
WikiLeaks' latest information release -- The Global Intelligence Files -- has yet to produce any major stories, but what is noteworthy are the media outlets with which the whistleblower site partnered this time around. WikiLeaks cites 25 media collaborators, none of which were among the site's original partner publications -- which condemned WikiLeak's uncensored release of its entire cache of secret diplomatic cables in September 2011 -- calling attention to the wedge driven between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian.
The 13th International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) generated a record 71 paper submissions, confirming the continuing growth of ISOJ’s reputation as a world-class conference. Twenty-two papers were accepted for presentation during the conference, to be held April 20-21, 2012, at the University of Texas at Austin. One of those papers will be selected as the conference's top research paper.
Just weeks after launching NewsRight, a company aimed at monitoring the unauthorized use of copyrighted material, on Tuesday, Feb. 14, the Associated Press (AP) sued Meltwater News for copyright infringement and “hot news” misappropriation, the AP said in a statement.
Pinterest, the social media curating site that allows users to "'pin' (bookmark) things you like -- photos, recipes, crafts, design ideas, photography, art, etc., and silo those items into 'boards,'" as MediaShift described it, might just be the next big thing for journalism, as cliché as that sounds. After all, TechCrunch just reported on Tuesday, Feb. 7, that Pinterest gets 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, having hit the 10-million mark faster than any other standalone site ever. And as Poynter pointed out, "it's time for journalists to pay attention to Pinterest."
On Wednesday, Feb. 8, CNN indefinitely suspended commentator Roland Martin for homophobic tweets he sent during the Super Bowl, reported the Washington Post.
Amy Webb didn’t have to look far for an example of how Spark Camp, an "un-conference" she helps organize, pulls disparate people together for an informal exchange of ideas and problem solving. Co-hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americasand the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, Spark Camp attracted an impressive variety of talented people to spend three days in January — in Austin — to ruminate on the crossroads of data and online journalism.
In the Brazilian city of Aral Moreira, Mato Grosso do Sul, the creator of the website and print publication O Arrastão, journalist Geraldo Ferreira, was threatened online in the comments section of his website, reported MS Já on Monday, Jan. 16.
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."
The Spanish language news agency EFE and the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation named five Latin American journalists winners of the King of Spain Journalism Awards on Jan. 12, reported EFE.