Journalism & Ethics

In India, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2023, 56% of respondents said they used YouTube for news with 39% using Facebook and 32% using Instagram. The country where TikTok is banned has about 462 million YouTube users. But, as India votes in this year’s crucial election, news channels are being banned or demonetised in a move criticised by press freedom groups. [Photo Reuters/Anushree Fadnavis. Supporters of Narendra Modi wear masks of his face, as they attend an election campaign rally in Meerut, India.]

Zhang Zhan, a Chinese citizen journalist who was jailed over her reporting on the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, was due to be released Monday 13th, supporters said.

At the 2024 NICAR conference, data experts grappled with the broader question of when and how AI is appropriate to use in newsrooms, and offered up a host of new, cutting edge AI tools to help investigative reporters.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) warns that state oppression and political pressure are increasingly threatening journalism around the globe in its 2024 World Press Freedom Index.

This study aims to assess the persistence of traditional journalistic quality features within the contemporary digital ecosystem. (...) However, there is a need to integrate these ethics with new criteria associated with the tools being used. Therefore, it is necessary to consider criteria from a dual perspective: both social and technological. [Free access.]

Tips from a workshop on how journalists and media outlets can better use YouTube in their election coverage.

The Press Council of South Africa has taken a significant step towards linguistic inclusivity by making its Press Code of Ethics and Conduct available in seven of the country's 12 official languages.Recent translations of the Press Code into isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sepedi, Tsonga, and Tshivenda signifies the ongoing commitment to embracing linguistic diversity within the South African media landscape. [Pondoland Times is a community newspaper with youth-centric content, based in the rural areas of Bizana, south east, near Durban.]

Awarded investigative stories are increasingly relying on machine learning, whether covering Chicago police negligence or Israeli weapons in Gaza...

One year after massive protests caused the government in Georgia to abandon its  “foreign agents” law, the ruling party, Georgian Dream, is trying to pass it again just months before the country’s parliamentary elections. The bill is familiarly called the “Russian law” in Tbilisi because it reprises the legal tactics used by Russian president Vladimir Putin to hamper publications such as Novaya Gazeta and Meduza, some of the most influential Russian independent news media, who have since been forced into exile. [Photo Tbel Abuseridze. On May 11, 2024, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Tbilisi to protest the Georgian ruling party's proposed "foreign agents" bill.]

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is a technology based on algorithms, models, etc., that creates content such as text, audio, images, videos, and code. GAI is deeply integrated into journalism as tools, platforms and systems.

Media adviser and AI consultant, Jeremy Clifford, returns from the International Journalism Festival of Perugia, central Italy, to give his reflections on this month's...

We need a new framework to understand how today’s autocrats control public opinion,  Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton University, writes. [Prime minister Viktor Orban on the photo. Subscription reading.]

Journalists at Italy's public broadcaster RAI went on strike on Monday may 6th to protest against staff shortages, budget cuts and the denial of fair contracts for those working on the network's news programmes - or what they called "suffocating control" by the government.

The precarity of journalistic labour has received significant scholarly attention globally, leading to a plethora of studies that attempt to theorise changing journalistic roles, practices, and norms. Whereas precarity in newswork is formulated as the “new normal” in the Global North, the precarious situation of marginal(ised) newsworkers in the Global South has been simply normal. [paid access.]

Established over four decades ago, the Bangladesh Press Council -- beset by a lack of manpower, and currently without a board -- is yet to become a body that wields meaningful authority in the country's journalism landscape... [The Daily Star is a non partisan media set in Dhaka since 1991.]

In Australia, a newspaper in a region of Victoria that has struggled to attract and retain females to local government has drawn criticism after publishing a cartoon depicting the council's new chief executive as a woman in an apron wielding a broom.The cartoon — depicting the Victorian council's first female leader — has fallen flat with women's advocates but the Australian Cartoonists Association says it is a depiction of the phrase "a new broom sweeps clean". A complaint should be lodged with the Australian Press Council.