- A need for support: In the conclusion to the Reuters report, it looks at what journalists who have been attacked and harassed would like to see happen, and the overwhelming answer was more support from other journalists and media organizations. “Our survey asked journalists who had been attacked for their work what would have been most helpful, and the clearest majority said the best support would be from other media organisations in their country. This, more than international support, and certainly more than support from foreign governments, is seen as vital.”
- Mexico and Greece: Last year, CJR wrote about the increasingly dangerous environment for journalists in Mexico, where four reporters were killed in a single month, including one whose body was found in the trunk of a car, showing signs of torture. And in Greece, CJR wrote about how the rise of a right-wing populist party had led to increasing attacks on journalists, including photographers who had their cameras and data cards forcibly taken from them during demonstrations held in protest of a political accord between Greece and Macedonia.
- Rising threat: According to a UNESCO report released in November, a total of 495 journalists were killed between 2014 and 2018, an 18 percent increase compared with the previous five-year period. The study, called Intensified Attacks, New Defences, said Arab countries were the most dangerous places for journalists in the 2014-2018 period, representing 30 percent (149 journalists) of global killings. The region was followed by Latin America and the Caribbean, where 26 percent (127 journalists) of the killings took place.
- Spotify is making another big-budget purchase aimed at getting a lead in the growing podcast industry, by offering to acquire The Ringer, the podcast-centric media company run and owned by Bill Simmons, according to a report from Vox. Spotify intends to hire Simmons and all of his approximately 90 employees, most of whom work on The Ringer’s website, which covers sports and culture, and Spotify intends to keep the site up and running, Vox says.
- The Justice Department has reached out to more than a dozen companies in its antitrust probe of Google, including publishers, advertising technology firms and advertising agencies, as the company’s online ad tools become a major focus of the investigation, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that quotes “people familiar with the matter.” The company’s third-party advertising business was built largely on the 2008 acquisition of ad-technology firm DoubleClick.
- Protocol, a new technology news site owned by Robert Allbritton, the man who co-founded Politico, launched on Wednesday. “The naive optimism of tech’s early days is gone, replaced by a backlash that, at its extremes, can be equally naive,” executive editor Tim Grieve wrote in his opening essay. “Tech can’t be wished out of existence, nor can we expect to enjoy all of its benefits without paying some of its costs. But neither can tech industry leaders expect to get by with a hopeful promise that they won’t be evil.”
- Google said the built-in ad blocker inside its Chrome browser will soon start blocking several new categories of video ads that users have said they find intrusive, including long, non-skippable pre-roll ads, mid-roll ads that appear in the middle of a video, or images and text ads that appear on top of a playing video and cover more than 20 percent of the content. If websites don’t remove these kinds of ads, they could find all their advertising blocked, Google says.
- The Knight Foundation has launched an open call for newsrooms that serve under-represented communities to apply for one-time grants of up to $20,000 to adopt or manage a new digital publishing system. The open call is part of a three-year, $2 million commitment by the foundation designed to help newsrooms access and adopt new digital publishing systems with the aim of increasing revenue, membership and audience engagement. The foundation says it will hold similar calls in 2021 and 2022.
- In a report published Wednesday, a London-based cybersecurity company tied the impersonation of journalists to a hacking group nicknamed Charming Kitten, which has long been associated with Iran. An Israeli security firm called ClearSky Cyber Security provided Reuters with documentation of similar impersonations of media figures at CNN and Deutsche Welle, a German public broadcaster. ClearSky also linked the hacking attempts to Charming Kitten, describing the individuals targeted as Israeli academics or researchers who study Iran.
- A New York Times report says that the Epoch Times, a mysterious Chinese publication that started 20 years ago as a print newspaper published by practitioners of the persecuted spiritual group Falun Gong, has ramped up its advertising spending on YouTube after being banned from Facebook for running afoul of the social network’s ad transparency policies. The company said the Epoch Times was connected to a group called TheBL that used fake accounts to generate interest in its content.
- The owner of The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press newspapers, as well as their community publications, has accepted buyouts from 20 people in its Virginia news operations as part of company-wide staff reductions. Tribune Publishing announced in mid-January that it would offer voluntary separation incentive plans to anyone with at least eight years of work history with Tribune. Its holdings include The Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel and the Baltimore Sun.
- The Poynter Institute spoke with former Texas Tribune editor Emily Ramshaw and former Tribune chief audience officer Amanda Zamora about their new startup, a publication called The 19th that is dedicated to empowering women through coverage of policy and politics that affect women in the US. “I want to build a newsroom for and by women where we allow women to advance in this most critical field without sacrificing their families or their children,” said Ramshaw.
- Jigsaw, a company that develops cutting-edge technology and is owned by Google’s parent Alphabet, recently unveiled a free tool that researchers said could help journalists spot doctored photographs, even ones created with the help of artificial intelligence. The tool, which is called Assembler, is being tested with more than a dozen news and fact-checking organizations around the world including Rappler in the Philippines and Agence France-Presse. The company said that it does not plan to offer the tool to the public.
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