Media News - Thursday, May 15, 2008

Twitters’ beat media in reporting China earthquake

The world had real-time news about China's massive earthquake as victims dashed out ‘twitter’ text messages while it took place, in what was being touted Tuesday as micro-blogging outshining mainstream news. As the earth shook with tragic consequences, people in the parts of China that felt the quake used their mobile telephones to send terse messages using the service provided by the San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. News of the deadly catastrophe reached Twitter devotees such as blogger Robert Scoble in San Francisco even before the massive temblor, which killed more than 12,000 people in Sichuan province, was reported by news organizations and the earthquake-tracking US Geological Survey. Twitters are abbreviated text messages that can be instantly posted on online bulletin boards and personal websites and sent to the mobile telephones of selected friends. They were at the forefront of a gush of quake pictures and video swiftly posted online via services such as Yahoo's Flickr, Google's YouTube, and French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur's fledgling Seesmic, which has been called the ‘Twitter of video.’ Twitter reportedly became a source of information for major news organizations covering the China earthquake. (AFP )

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Italian appeals court reverses acquittal of Vatican Radio officials

Italy’s top appeals court reversed the acquittal of two Vatican Radio officials implicated in alleged electromagnetic pollution emanating from the station’s transmitters. The Court of Cassation announced its decision late Tuesday evening to put both the former director and president of the radio station back on trial, after they were acquitted in June 2007 by Rome’s court of appeal. Vatican Radio said Wednesday it was disappointed with this latest decision. In 2001, residents from Cesano, north of Rome, took Vatican Radio to court, alleging its nearby high-power transmitters caused leukaemia and other serious health problems in the community. Investigators from the Italian Environment Ministry at the time found levels of electromagnetic fields that largely surpassed the legal limit of six volts per metre. A damning report from the public health agency for Latium, the region surrounding Rome, followed. The investigation revealed infant mortality rates from leukemia in Cesano to be three times that of other areas. The charges of electromagnetic pollution brought about a ten-day jail sentence for Cardinal Roberto Tucci, the president of Vatican Radio, and father Pasquale Borgomeo, the station’s director at the time. That sentence was appealed by Vatican Radio, which said Wednesday it had always conformed to international recommendations for electromagnetic emissions prior even to the existence of any such legislation in Italy. Following Tuesday’s decision, Vatican Radio said it would show there was no risk to local residents in the next round of litigation. (AFP via Media Network Weblog)

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Vietnam media decry reporters’ arrests

The arrests of two Vietnamese reporters for their coverage of a bribery, gambling and corruption scandal have led to a highly unusual confrontation between Vietnam's Communist government and the country's state-controlled newspapers. Vietnamese newspapers are generally deferential to the government, which controls all of the nation's media. But this week's arrests unleashed a torrent of protests from journalists and bloggers, who said the detentions would discourage aggressive reporting on corruption, one of Vietnam's most urgent problems. Sparking their outrage were the arrests Monday of Nguyen Viet Chien of Thanh Nien and Nguyen Van Hai of Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper. Authorities also arrested one police investigator and interrogated another who were accused of providing false information to the journalists. The reporters are accused of ‘abuse of authority’ for allegedly inaccurate reporting on a major corruption scandal that led to the resignation of the transportation minister in 2006. Tuoi Tre published a story Wednesday saying it was inundated by phone calls, e-mails and letters from angry citizens protesting the government's move — the most it had received in 33 years of publication. (AP via ABC News)

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New study calls ‘embed’ program for U.S. media in Iraq a ‘victory’ - for the Pentagon

Debate over the ‘embedded journalist’ program run by the Pentagon since the weeks before the Iraq invasion in 2003 has long raged, with some claiming that it gave reporters valuable close access to action while others saying that the journalists were severely compromised within it. Now sociologist Andrew M. Lindner, writing in the spring issue of the American Sociological Association's ‘Context’ magazine describes what is billed as the only sociological study to date of the substantive content of media coverage during the first six weeks of the Iraq war. Lindner found that journalists embedded with American troops emphasized military successes more often than they covered consequences for Iraqi citizens. ‘The embedded program proved to be a Pentagon victory because it kept reporters focused on the horrors facing the troops, not the horrors of the civilian war experience,’ wrote Lindner, who is completing his doctoral dissertation at Penn State University. ‘The end result: a communications victory for an administration that hoped to build support for the war by depicting it as a successful mission with limited cost.’ Lindner's conclusions are the result of a content analysis of 742 news articles written by 156 English-language print reporters in Iraq during the first six weeks of the war. (Editor and Publisher)

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Google starts to blur faces in Street View photos

After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program. Rolling it out will take several months, however. Although Google's Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year. As specially equipped Google vehicles cruised city streets snapping panoramic images of homes and businesses, the resulting photos revealed people falling off bikes, exiting strip joints, crossing the street, sunbathing — everyday, in-public things but nonetheless, things they might not have wanted preserved for posterity. Some privacy advocates, including the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Google blur the images of people. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View's goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there. This week, Google revealed it had indeed begun deploying a facial-recognition algorithm that scans photos for mugs to blur. The changes are happening first in scenes in New York, before slowly expanding to the other 40 cities in Street View. Google spokesman Larry Yu said the company is still tweaking the system. For now it tends to err on the side of blurring too many things — things a computer erroneously interprets as faces — but that is better than leaving too many faces unblurred, Yu said. (AP)

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Call for entries: 2008 Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism

The Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism celebrate the best in freelance print journalism and local reporters who show great courage and commitment to reporting on controversial issues. Two USD 5,000 prizes are awarded each year, one to a local reporter covering local stories in a developing country or nation in transition, and the other to a freelance journalist covering international news. The stories can focus on conflict, human-rights concerns, cross-border issues, or any other issue of controversy in a particular country or region. Underwritten by the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund and Reuters, the prizes honour Kurt Schork, an American freelance journalist who was killed in a military ambush while on assignment for Reuters on May 24, 2000, in Sierra Leone. Deadline for receipt of entries: June 1, 2008 (IWPR)

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