Journalism

> > > Editor’s notes: The list below is CPJ’s most recent and preliminary account of journalist deaths in the war. Our database will not include all of these casualties until we have completed further investigations into the circumstances surrounding them. > >

> > > The AP and PBS "Frontline" found over 1,000 people from 2012 through 2021 died after police used tactics that were not supposed to be lethal. > >

> > > All Cases > > > > A team of journalists led by The Associated Press has documented 1,036 deaths over the decade from 2012–2021 after police used physical force or weapons that are meant to be safer than firearms. Browse themes uncovered by this investigation, view details from all the cases and search for cities and towns where deaths happened. > >

The St. Croix Avis, a newspaper with a storied 180-year history serving the people of St. Croix, has announced it will soon cease operations. The news marks the end of a significant chapter in the territory's media landscape.

> > > In the end, though, the crux of this lawsuit is the same as all the others. It’s a false belief that reading something (whether by human or machine) somehow implicates copyright. This is false. If the courts (or the legislature) decide otherwise, it would upset pretty much all of the history of copyright and create some significant real world problems. > > > > Part of the Times complaint is that OpenAI’s GPT LLM was trained in part with Common Crawl data. Common Crawl is an incredibly useful and important resource that apparently is now coming under attack. It has been building an open repository of the web for people to use, not unlike the Internet Archive, but with a focus on making it accessible to researchers and innovators. Common Crawl is a fantastic resource run by some great people (though the lawsuit here attacks them). > > > > But, again, this is the nature of the internet. It’s why things like Google’s cache and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine are so important. These are archives of history that are incredibly important, and have historically been protected by fair use, which the Times is now threatening. > > > > (Notably, just recently, the NY Times was able to get all of its articles excluded from Common Crawl. Otherwise I imagine that they would be a defendant in this case as well). > > > > Either way, so much of the lawsuit is claiming that GPT learning from this data is infringement. And, as we’ve noted repeatedly, reading/processing data is not a right limited by copyright. We’ve already seen this in multiple lawsuits, but this rush of plaintiffs is hoping that maybe judges will be wowed by this newfangled “generative AI” technology into ignoring the basics of copyright law and pretending that there are now rights that simply do not exist. > >

The Associated Press (AP) News Guild announced Sunday it has struck a deal with management on a three-year contract after 19 months of negotiations that culminated in a final end-of-year push.

“This announcement follows rounds of intense discussions with the company over the last two weeks, culminating in even more intense discussions over the last two days. Our efforts were backed by strong member pressure through social media, petitions and emails to AP executives,” the union said in a statement.

At least 12 journalists in the United States were arrested or faced dubious charges in 2023, among them two journalists in Alabama who were charged with felonies for “publishing” and a reporter in Illinois who was cited for asking city employees “too many questions.” The criminalization of routine journalism this year shows authorities either do not understand newsgathering practices or, more alarmingly, do and use prosecutions as a cudgel to chill future reporting.

Smith worked at The Wall Street Journal for more than 20 years covering the electricity industry.

France, Italy, Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, and Sweden aim to undermine the first European law aimed at protecting freedom and independence of media in Europe. According to documents obtained by Disclose, in partnership with Investigate Europe and Follow the Money, these seven countries actively advocate for authorizing surveillance of journalists in the name of “national security”.

The tug of war is coming to an end. For over a year, a bill designed to protect media freedom in Europe, the European Media Freedom Act, has been the subject of intense debates in Brussels and Strasbourg. Within this document aimed at ensuring the independence, freedom, and pluralism of the media, one article stands at the heart of tensions between the member states and the European Parliament: Article 4, concerning the protection of journalistic sources, considered as one of the “basic conditions for press freedom” by the European Court of Human Rights. Without this protection, “the vital public-watchdog role of the press as guardian of the public sphere may be undermined.”

Disclose, in partnership with the collective of journalists Investigate Europe and the media Follow the Money, has managed to penetrate the closed-door negotiations. Our investigation unveils the details of fifteen months of negotiations that could lead to a final text on December 15, 2023, after a third round of discussions between the EU Council, the Parliament, and the European Commission. These documents (summarised at the end of this article) reveal the repressive intentions of the French government against the press, actively supported by the far-right Italian government and the authorities of Finland, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, and Sweden.

Looking back at Apple Daily, the newspaper that wasn't afraid to raise its voice against the Chinese government. The BBC published this after Apple Daily shut down in 2021.

Almost two-thirds of the $100 million Google must give to news outlets across the country each year will be distributed to print and digital media, with the remaining third being split between CBC/Radio-Canada and other private and public broadcasters.

Gessen, a queer Jew, is being punished by the German political machine for being too open about the nature of global authoritarianism.

> > > Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has built an impressive career in US journalism by being a constant thorn in the side of the Russian state. That journalistic campaign entered a new chapter in November when the Russian government issued a warrant for their arrest > >

> > > Gessen, a staff writer at the New Yorker, gave an interview in which they spoke about well-documented Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha (OHCHR, 12/7/22). The Russian government, forever clamping down on negative press of its military invasion of Ukraine, symbolically declared them an outlaw. (Gessen lives in the United States.) > >

> > > In the post-2016 shock of Donald Trump’s presidential election, a great deal of US media fell into a trance of believing that Trump’s success could only be explained by Russian electoral sabotage. Gessen, refreshingly, took a different approach. Rather than blame one regime for the electoral outcome, they rightfully put Trump in the context of a global movement of authoritarian backlash toward liberalism. Their pieces linking Trump’s success to the rise of authoritarianism in Russia and Hungary remain essential reading > >

> > > But when Gessen turned their lens to Israel, they fell victim to pro-Israel censorship. Their recent essay (New Yorker, 12/9/23) on Holocaust remembrance culture in Germany was a self-fulfilling prophecy: As a result of Gessen’s observation that the language that most accurately describes what is happening in Gaza—”the ghetto is being liquidated”—comes from the Jewish experience during World War II, the Green Party–affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS), which was planning to award Gessen its Hannah Arendt Prize, canceled the event. > >

> > > There is a special irony in a prize in the name of German Jewish philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt, whose work on the rise of German fascism is essential, being withheld from another Jewish journalist for writing about the rise of authoritarianism. > > > > Arendt herself, as Gessen’s essay noted, wasn’t afraid to link Zionist extremism with the “N word,” joining other Jewish intellectuals in 1948 (including Albert Einstein) who protested the visit of Israeli politician Menachem Begin to the United States, denouncing Begin’s Herut (Freedom) party as “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” (Haaretz, 12/4/14). It seems likely that Hannah Arendt would also be deemed unworthy to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize. > >

IANS will now operate as a subsidiary of Adani’s AMG Media Networks.

And the controversial billionaire's influence over Indian media continues to grow.

One of Chinese Communist party’s most outspoken critics faces prospect of life in prison

Newspaper sports sections are still struggling. The Athletic is pivoting. So some enterprising local-sports journalists are trying to take up the slack.

A new class action lawsuit filed this week in the U.S. District Court in D.C. accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of anticompetitive behavior in violation of U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, and others, on behalf of news publishers. The case, filed by Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, argues that Google “siphons off” news publishers’ content, their readers and ad revenue through anticompetitive means. It also specifically cites new AI technologies like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and Bard AI chatbot as worsening the problem.

AI-generated news anchors will take to the screen as soon as February.

In a rapidly escalating case that is worrying First Amendment advocates, journalist Catherine Herridge could soon be held in contempt of court if she does not reveal her source for the investigative stories she wrote in 2017.

Herridge, now a reporter for CBS News who worked for Fox News at the time, has a Thursday deadline to explain to a federal judge why she should not face the civil sanction — and the hefty, accumulating fines that could come with it.

U.S. District Court Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled Aug. 1 that Herridge must reveal how she learned about a federal probe into a Chinese American scientist who operated a graduate program in Virginia — the subject of several stories Herridge reported for Fox.

Yanping Chen was never charged as a result of the investigation, which sought to determine whether she had lied about her military service and whether her school’s student database could be accessed from China, as the Fox News reports revealed. But after those stories brought the probe to light, Chen sued the federal government alleging that Herridge had been given leaked materials that violated her privacy, including photographs and images of internal government documents.

After Chen’s lawyers conducted 18 depositions of government and other officials without learning the source of the leak, according to her legal filing, Chen has argued that only the journalist could provide the information she needed to pursue her grievance against the government.

The judge came to the same conclusion. While acknowledging “the vital importance of a free press and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists,” Cooper ruled in August that Chen’s need for the evidence “overcomes Herridge’s qualified First Amendment privilege.”

But First Amendment advocates disagreed, arguing that journalists can perform their public service function only if they are able to protect the identities of their confidential sources.