Rest of World: Twitter blocked 122 accounts in India at the government’s request. “Twitter blocked 122 accounts belonging to journalists, authors, and politicians in India this week in response to legal requests from the Indian government.”
Search Engine Land: How The Verge gamed Google with its ‘best printer 2023’ article. “Technology news publisher The Verge has published a 600-word article half-filled with ChatGPT content and a heavy dose of sarcasm that has been outranking more in-depth, well-researched and arguably more helpful content written by humans at publications like the New York Times for the competitive query [best printer 2023].”
PetaPixel: To Save its Content, Archive Team is Attempting to Back Up All of DPReview. “Following yesterday’s news that DPReview is shutting down, photographers around the web began wondering what would happen to its huge library of articles, reviews, and camera test images, including the website’s excellent studio shot comparison tool. Archive Team aims to scrape more than 4 million articles and posts within the next three weeks.”
Washington Post Engineering: Here’s how The Washington Post verified its journalists on Mastodon. “A small cross-disciplinary team of engineers worked together to add a feature so journalists at The Washington Post could link their Mastodon profiles from The Post’s website and verify themselves on the social network.”
BBC: How Elon Musk’s tweets unleashed a wave of hate. “There have been hundreds of posts, many including misogynistic slurs and abusive language. There have also been threatening messages, including depictions of kidnap and hanging.”
Global Investigative Journalism Network: New Investigative Tools for Monitoring Social Media Platforms. “Originally designed to monitor disinformation and ‘junk news,’ Junkipedia has developed to the point where the tool will change its name this year, to reflect its new global, all-purpose digging role. Junkipedia was designed by, and for, investigative journalists and researchers — and it’s free.”
Deadline: Twitter Responds To All Email Inquiries From The Press With A Poop Emoji, 51-Year-Old Owner Elon Musk Reports. “All inquiries from members of the press directed to Twitter’s official press email now receive the same automatic reply: a poop emoji. Elon Musk, who bought the social media company for $44 billion last year, relayed the update on his own Twitter feed over the weekend.” This is such a stupid waste of pixels I’m ashamed to be typing it. But I want evidence somewhere so that 40 years down the road nobody dismisses this story as apocryphal.
National Press Club Journalism Institute: Open records tips from a government accountability reporter: ‘Let the correspondence tell the tale’ . “It is Sunshine Week, an annual celebration of access to public information launched by the News Leaders Association in 2005. To commemorate the occasion, we’ve asked journalists across different beats to share their tips for requesting open records and responding when facing roadblocks to access.”
New York Times: Justice Dept. Investigating TikTok’s Owner Over Possible Spying on Journalists. “The inquiry appears to be tied to an admission by the app’s owner, ByteDance, that employees had inappropriately obtained Americans’ data. The company said it had fired the workers involved.”
NiemanLab: The Prison Newspaper Directory finds that the number of prison-based papers is growing. “The local newspaper industry has seen better days (though not so much in my lifetime). One growth spot, however, is where you might not expect it: Behind bars. According to the newly launched Prison Newspaper Directory by the Prison Journalism Project, there are 24 prison-based newspapers in 12 states. At least four of the papers were launched in the last year.”
Chicago Tribune / Elkin Courier-News: Thanks to grant and hours of museum volunteer work, old Elgin newspaper photos now available online. “Hundreds of old black-and-white photos capturing decades of Elgin’s past are now online for the world to view thanks to the work of Elgin History Museum volunteers and a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Negatives of photos taken by The Courier-News between 1936 and 1994 were donated to the museum in the 1990s, museum curator Beth Nawara said. The images are being digitized so they can be made available electronically.” This project has just started — they’re about 3,000 pictures in to a collection of 100,000 images.
The Guardian: Unlocking the stories behind the shorthand. “The largest part of the collection was made up of reporter’s notebooks, chiefly written in shorthand. Sadly, a combined decade and a half as archivists in a newspaper archive had left us none the wiser when it came to reading this. When we managed to secure a precious few minutes of help from some of the Guardian’s journalists, we found out that this was Pitman New Era shorthand, not widely taught in the UK since the 1970s.”
Craig Silverman / Digital Investigations: Getting the most out of the Wayback Machine. “Roughly a year ago, the Wayback Machine Chrome extension got a major update. The new version has useful customization features and the ability to connect it to your personal Wayback Machine account, making it an even more essential tool for journalists and investigators.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch: Opinion: Casting shade on Virginia’s ‘Sunshine Law’. “What was once the domain of overreaching politicians and campaign-season hyperbole, the idea that U.S. democracy is under attack means something different in 2023. Meanwhile, perhaps our best tool for combating propaganda and misinformation — the Freedom of Information Act — continues to get treated in the Virginia General Assembly like a bureaucratic nuisance.”
Federal News Network: FOIA backlogs on the rise after record number of requests . “Freedom of Information Act backlogs soared at some key agencies after the public filed a record number of FOIA requests in fiscal 2022. Agencies received 928,353 requests last year and processed 878,420 requests, both record highs, according to the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy. Agencies were required to upload their fiscal 2022 annual FOIA reports by March 1.”
