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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Reuters: Reuters reporters’ online accounts faked to approach China activists. “Two Reuters journalists had their identities faked by an unknown person or people who then used sham social media accounts to engage with Chinese activists on several online platforms over several months.”
BBC: How fake copyright complaints are muzzling journalists. “Journalists have been forced to temporarily take down articles critical of powerful oil lobbyists due to the exploitation of US copyright law, according to a new report.”
Bianet: Türkiye sentences a journalist under ‘disinformation law’ for first time. “Sinan Aygül had tweeted about allegations of child abuse against security, but deleted the tweets a few hours later, apologizing for sharing unconfirmed information.”
NiemanLab: Twitter will soon let news outlets lay visual claim to their staffers’ accounts. Should they?. “… it falls short of ownership, but a Twitter feature now in testing would visually tie journalists’ accounts to their employers more clearly than before. As Press Gazette reports, several staffers of the U.K. tabloid the Daily Mirror are the media industry’s guinea pigs. On these journalists’ personal Twitter accounts, there is now (next to the oft-debated blue checkmark) a small Mirror icon to indicate the affiliation with their employer.”
Northeastern Global News: Rare rock star interviews ‘raw, complete and unedited’ in new Northeastern digital archive . “Now, for the first time, [Larry] Katz’s interviews with some of the most famous musicians and other cultural figures in history—many of them now deceased—are available for the public to peruse. Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono all spoke to Katz during his career, and all of their interviews are now a part of Northeastern University Library’s digital archive of what’s known as the Katz Tapes.”
Washington Post: Influencers outshine traditional media on coverage of FTX implosion. “All this coverage of the FTX implosion is the most prominent example of how so-called ‘citizen journalism’ is battling legacy publishers for online attention, catapulting a fresh class of independent journalists into the mainstream while also giving rise to a group of social media influencers who optimize for attention rather than accuracy.”
Ars Technica: TikTok cops to running “covert surveillance campaign” on Western journalists. “Following an internal investigation, TikTok owner ByteDance today confirmed reports from this fall that claimed some of its employees used the popular app to track multiple journalists, including two in the US. The ByteDance employees’ goal? To identify anonymous sources who were leaking information to the media on the company’s ties to the Chinese government, according to The New York Times.”
New York Times: ByteDance Inquiry Finds Employees Obtained User Data of 2 Journalists. “ByteDance, the China-based parent company of TikTok, said on Thursday that an internal investigation found that employees had inappropriately obtained the data of U.S. TikTok users, including two reporters.”
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