Facebook has launched a new initiative in partnership with a number of journalism organisations to help journalists “protect their accounts and themselves on Facebook.”
The Facebook Safety for Journalists page covers 10 steps that journalists should take, ranging from password protection to abuse and harassment. Continue reading
Image by Tony Hirst
In admirably succinct fashion, and with illustrations, he picks apart those six things. It’s a masterclass in the sort of system knowledge that every journalism student should have, because this knowledge is crucial to newsgathering and verification. Continue reading
US politician Aaron Schock has been the subject of some innovative digging by the Associated Press in a particularly fascinating example of how media metadata can be matched with public records and website data:
“The AP tracked Schock’s reliance on the aircraft partly through the congressman’s penchant for uploading pictures and videos of himself to his Instagram account. The AP extracted location data associated with each image then correlated it with flight records showing airport stopovers and expenses later billed for air travel against Schock’s office and campaign records.”
The article explains that “earlier rules prohibited lawmakers from using … accounts to pay for flights on private aircraft, allowing payments only for federally licensed charter and commercial flights.”
This is the fourth in a series of extracts from a draft book chapter on ethics in data journalism. The first looked at how ethics of accuracy play out in data journalism projects, the second at culture clashes, privacy, user data and collaboration, and the third at mass data gathering. This is a work in progress, so if you have examples of ethical dilemmas, best practice, or guidance, I’d be happy to include it with an acknowledgement.
Most news organisations’ professional guidelines include sections on protecting sources. In some countries this is also enshrined in law. Many journalists, however, are not aware of how they can betray sources’ identity by publishing original files online.
Metadata stored in those files – information about the date and location of access, the computers and accounts used, and other data, can be used to identify a leaker. Even photocopied or printed materials can bear invisible digital watermarks which describe what machines were used to produce them, and when (Reimer, 2005; PicMarkr, 2008). Continue reading
Neil Smith is an investigative researcher and open source intelligence trainer. In this interview, originally posted on the Help Me Investigate blog, he gives his tips for using online sources to follow people and verify information.
Great post at Boing Boing (which AP could learn a thing or two about new business models from) on AP’s recent announcement “that they had spent millions of dollars on a DRM system for news that would limit how you could paste the text you copied from your browser window”. Ed Felten did some digging:
“Unfortunately for AP, the hNews spec bears little resemblance to AP’s claims about it. hNews is a handy way of annotating news stories with information about the author, dateline, and so on. But it doesn’t “encapsulate” anything in a “wrapper”, nor does it do much of anything to facilitate metering, monitoring, or paywalls.
“AP also says that hNews ” includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online”. This may sound like a restrictive DRM scheme, aimed at clawing back the rights copyright grants to users. But read the fine print. hNews does include a “rights” field that can be attached to an article, but the rights field uses ccREL, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language, whose definition states unequivocally that it does not limit users’ rights already granted by copyright and can only convey further rights to the user.”
FROM THE COMMENTS: Matthew Somerville points to Yoz Grahame’s excellent post on the subject, which suggests some rather more intelligent ideas and also looks at the Media Standards Trust’s Value-Added News project.
ALSO FROM THE COMMENTS: Steve Yelvington gives a good backgrounder (thanks Martin Stabe).
UPDATE: Via @Quinparker, here’s a much funnier version of AP’s little diagram:
Online Journalism Blog 
