Future of journalism

May 12, 2008

Twitter’s quicker debate over

The BBCs Rory Cellan-Jones wonders whether Twitter has come of age with the earthquake that struck Sichuan province in China this morning, Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while […]


May 7, 2008

Fact check the media

Following on from the non-reaction that greeted the New York Times’ Pentagon media poodles story, Wired’s Danger Room suggests if journalists don’t fancy digging into the story, readers can do it themselves, You can launch your own investigation, right now. The Defense Department has released thousands of pages of documents related to this outreach effort. […]


May 6, 2008

Twittering from the frontline

In case you didn’t know… we have a Twitter account. Twitter is a free, easy to update microblogging tool. We use it predominantly to broadcast to subscribers when there are new updates to any of the From the Frontline blogs. You can find out more about how Twitter works here. If you already use Twitter, […]


May 5, 2008

The new live news

[video:youtube:nnffuBGNOfY] Josh Wolf has an interesting idea for a new live internet news network based – surprise surprise seeing as how it’s the internet we’re talking about – in San Francisco. He aims to harness live video broadcasting tools like Qik, Flixwagon and Ustream.tv – which Kyle MacRae has previously discussed around these parts – […]


May 2, 2008

Is new media killing journalism?

Panelists at New Media is Killing Journalism? debate, originally uploaded by Nico Macdonald. Nico Macdonald has blogged his notes from the “Is new media killing journalism?” debate that took place at the Frontline Club this morning. Meanwhile the Guardian’s Kevin Anderson is nonplussed by the whole affair. We’ll have the video of the event up […]


April 18, 2008

Digital war reporting

Three very interesting links come our way this week. First up, Kings of War leads us to the New Media and the Warfighter report from a Center for Strategic leadership workshop. The report concludes, New media as a means to achieve strategic information effects is an integral part of today’s military operating environment. link Meanwhile, […]


April 11, 2008

The Foreign Correspondent in 2013

You’ve got until 2013. At the Media Re:Public conference in Los Angeles last month Solana Larsen threw out this provocative statement, In 2013, there will be no foreign correspondents link Or rather… not foreign correspondents as we have known them. We’ve discussed a possible future for them before – basically one that is economically feasible, […]


April 8, 2008

Social media news tracking

Georg Blume of Germany and Kristin Kupfer of Austria left from Lhasa train station in the early hours of Thursday March 20th. In so doing they became the last two foreign journalists to leave Tibet after being forced out by the Chinese authorities. “If they don’t have anything to hide, then why are they making […]


March 26, 2008

Mapping the media

Interesting wee mapping experiment that takes an image of the world and maps the number of stories written about different countries and lays it on top of the map. The results, unsurprisingly, tells us much of the planet goes unreported. Nicolas Kayser-Bril explains more, These maps allow you to grasp several media trends at a […]


March 4, 2008

Social networking sites have brought new opportunities for journalists, and new problems

Social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo are awash with video and pictures uploaded by the general public. News organisations are grappling with what they can and can’t use from the sites, but there is no agreed standard and recent months have seen them make a litany of mistakes. In January, Steve Herrmann, Editor of […]


March 3, 2008

NATO discusses digital media

NATO Review discusses the effects of new media and blogging upon the amount and quality of information coming out of warzones today. The video discussion includes contributions from the founder of liveleak.com – a haven for bomb blasts, humvee crashes and the like. The discussion accompanies an article by our very own Vaughan Smith about […]


February 12, 2008

Global incident locator

Following on from the BBC’s Foreign Correspondent’s map of the world, I discover the Global Incident map. The idea is pretty simple. Incidents of terror, war, conflict and the like are fed into the map. You can click incidents to find out more and go to the original news source.


February 8, 2008

Grigory Pasko on Russian media

[video:youtube:n9OUmV-B14M] Journalist and blogger Grigory Pasko talks about how the murder of Anna Politkovskaya changed freedom of press in Russia, and discusses the new role of the internet.


January 28, 2008

Missing what’s important

In an interview Salam Adil at the excellent blog aggregator, Global Voices, sums up the limitations of the mainstream media working in Iraq, Many times the mainstream media, by sheer virtue of being a foreign organisation, completely misses what is important. Blogs can fill in these gaps or provide insight into what is happening that […]


January 12, 2008

David Greising on foreign correspondents

David Greising talks about being a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Economic worries and the future of the profession are foremost in his mind. Greising’s piece is one of three taking the temperature of the people who work for the Tribune, “Nobody really knows what the fun-damental economics are going to look like going […]


January 8, 2008

Is our media dying?

[video:youtube:e09PxmPJ-Tg] Not all the indicators agree with the sentiment shown in the Simpsons video, but many of the American ones do.


January 6, 2008

The blogs of war

[video:dailymotion:x29jxt] Broadcast Journalist David Heathfield has a great 8 minute long report on the impact of the internet on how war is reported and who is reporting it in the 21st century. This video offers a good deal of background leading on from our previous post on Reporting restrictions. via cyberjournalist


January 3, 2008

Future of foreign reporting

The World podcast discusses the future of the foreign correspondent with HotZone war reporter Kevin Sites, ex-Baltimore Sun reporter John Schidlovsky, David Sasaki of Global Voices, McClatchy’s Roy Gutman and Ed Fooey, a media analyst. There is some talk of the ‘one man bureaus’ we discussed earlier at fromthefrontline. You can listen direct here – […]


January 2, 2008

Fesperman on foreign correspondents

Former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent and political thriller writer Dan Fesperman talks about his work and how he’s glad he’s not a newbie starting out in journalism today, It’s depressing. I look around, and you look at the number of foreign bureaus, and they’re fewer every day. The Sun used to have eight. Well, they […]


December 21, 2007

Top underreported stories of 2007

It’s nearly the end of the year, it must be list time. Medecins Sans Frontieres release their tenth annual top ten list of stories they think journalists don’t report enough on and readers don’t get to read enough about. Here’s the list. Or see a quick view of the list below, 1. Displaced fleeing war […]


December 4, 2007

The Demise and Rise of the Foreign Correspondent

“The trench coated foreign correspondent as Gregory Peck played him in the movies is suddenly almost extinct” So began Christopher Lydon on the Open Source podcast in February, 2007 in reponse to the closure of three foreign bureaus of the Boston Globe. The Globe cutbacks followed the axing of foreign staff across the Daily Telegraph. […]


November 27, 2007

Reuters get their mojo converged

[video:youtube:L_OJGeamwbs] There’s a lot of talk (too much???) about “media convergence” and here’s some more in a video filmed during a roundtable at Reuters to discuss their mobile journalism project. The news agency is experimenting with small handheld Nokia recording equipment. While it’s not the norm now, it’s a fascinating look at where “convergence” is […]


November 9, 2007

Aid dependency

Glenda Cooper writes a column in The Guardian about the changing face of foreign news reporting, telling titled From their own correspondent. She argues, convincingly, that the general public are, and always were, more likely to be the first on the scene at any major news event before the press ranks and aid workers arrive. […]


September 27, 2007

Cellphone journalism

“This time, compared to 1988, there are lots of new technologies to get the news out of Burma … People are able to take pictures, videos to evidence what is going on. It is quite amazing for Burma, which is a very poor country,” said Vincent Brossel, director of the Asia desk for Reporters Without […]