How the digital age is affecting journalists' source protection, how online news is helping journalists in Venezuela and more in this week's Digital Media Mash Up, produced by the Center for International Media Assistance.
Recommendations for protecting sources in the digital age
At the World News Media Congress in Washington D.C., the World Editors Forum revealed an 11-point framework for the protection of journalistic sources. (Journalism.co.uk, 6/3)
In Venezuela, online news helps journalists get their voices back
When Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was rumored to be gravely ill four years ago, his socialist government was tightlipped about the diagnosis. Then in June 2011, a source in Havana, Cuba, where Chávez was being treated, told Nelson Bocaranda, a veteran columnist for the Caracas daily El Universal, that the president had cancer.
Fearing a backlash from the government, which has been cracking down on independent media, El Universal balked at running the story, Bocaranda said. "They didn't dare publish it," the journalist claimed in a video and Web interview in March, on the second anniversary of Chavez's death. "So I figured, 'OK, I will post this on my own Web page.'" Shortly afterward, El Universal and other outlets published the story. (Committee to Protect Journalists, 6/1)
Developers and reporters have more in common than they think
At media companies I’ve worked with and visited, developers and reporters were often on different floors, if they were in the same building. If it was a smaller operation, just reporting website issues involved a long back-and-forth email with the third-party vendor that employed part-time developers. There was often utter confusion around how to communicate the issues we were having and how we could get programmers of some kind to fix them. (Elite Truong, Poynter, 6/3)
As Gawker writers unionize, the labor movement adapts to a post-union world
As of Thursday morning, America has its newest unionized workforce, with editorial staff at Gawker Media voting to join the Writers Guild of America, East.
The successful organizing drive — the first at a big digital media company — is a small victory for the beleaguered union movement, adding just under 120 workers to the ever-dwindling number of unionized Americans. But it’s far from the only win celebrated lately by the wider labor movement, which has a spring in its step for the first time in decades. (BuzzFeed News, 6/4)
CIMA offers the Mash Up free via email. Sign up here.
Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via GotCredit.
Read more articles by
