The quarterly Frontline Broadsheet is coming. It’s high quality. It’s printed – and yes I do mean on paper, we’re doing this the old fashioned way – and it’s subscription only. To find out more send an email to broadsheet@www.beta.frontlineclub.com with the word BROADSHEET in the subject header. For blog readers and Twitter followers, here’s a taster of what to expect,
Peter Stanford on Tony Blair’s Catholicism
Muzamil Jaleel on Pakistan’s ï¬ght against Jihad.
The future for peacekeeping in Kosovo
Julian Cardona, photo essay, on fear and death in Mexico
Martin Bell on the return of British sleaze
Clive Stafford Smith on Anglo-American torture
David Hoffman on the police and databases
Baroness Susan Greenï¬eld issues a warning
George Sotiropoulos behind the Greek protests
Ed Vulliamy on Italian artists ï¬ghting the Maï¬a
John Carlin and his Hollywood coincidence
Robert Fox questions Gergiev’s political allies
Simon Freeman: the demise of football managers
Comic strip GOBAMA: Frontline’s resident president by Stephen Daly.
Illustrators and photographers include Chris Riddell, Shirley Hughes and Clara Vulliamy, David Hoffman, Tom Stoddart, Julian Cardona.
I for one, can’t wait… I’ll have more on this next week.
UPDATE: There’s the beginnings of a facebook group.
]]>McMafia is a fearless, encompassing, wholly authoritative investigation of the now proven ability of organized crime worldwide to find and service markets driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares. Whether discussing the Russian mafia, Colombian drug cartels, or Chinese labor smugglers, Misha Glenny makes clear how organized crime feeds off the poverty of the developing world, how it exploits new technology in the forms of cybercrime and identity theft, and how both global crime and terror are fueled by an identical source: the triumphant material affluence of the West.
UPDATE: Here is the recording of the interview. Please excuse the silence at the beginning 
The Frontline Club is profiled in The Independent newspaper today. Chris Green heads into the clubroom and rummages through the glass cabinets full of memorabilia left by the foreign correspondents and war reporters who make up the club’s membership. Among the bits and pieces he finds is Vaughan Smith‘s mobile phone,
]]>“We heard there was fighting in Prekaz, so I went to film the Serbs attacking this tiny hamlet,” he remembers. “I got shot at and a bullet hit my phone, which was in a pouch around my waist with cigarettes and a roll of 3,000 Deutschmarks. I felt something but didn’t realise I’d been hit, so I carried on filming. After, I thought I’d better contact my missus to say I was alright and discovered my phone was not capable of making calls. It slowed down the bullet, but ultimately I think I was saved by the Deutschmarks.” link
“If they don’t have anything to hide, then why are they making foreign journalists leave? It’s clear that they don’t want any witnesses,” said Vincent Brossel, who heads Reporters Without Borders’ Asia desk according to the Associated Press.
Without journalists on the ground, news media rely heavily upon telephoning contacts within Lhasa, mobile phone images and video uploaded to the internet along with eyewitness accounts that appear upon blogs and microblogs like Twitter. Much of this information is difficult to substantiate. In addition, many journalists find the digital world an alien environment – a scary place they find impossible to penetrate.
However, as we touch on in the Frontline Club Blogging and Beyond training course, with the intelligent use of a number of free tools tracking this information is relatively easy.
RSS, or really simple syndication, is the key. Think of RSS as the plumbing and the internet as the water running through the pipes. RSS allows you to reroute the flow of water in any direction you like using keywords i.e. Tibet, Lhasa, “Georg Blume”, “Dalai Lama”. Firstly you need an RSS newsreader like the online Google Reader or a downloadable application like NetNewsWire or Newsgator.
To track blogs, photos, video and news items relating to any of these keywords you need to visit the websites where the information is most likely to appear. Then you run a number of searches using keywords and subscribe to the RSS feed of the search results. This means that whenever your keywords appear on any of the news, blog, photo or video sites you have searched on, the result will appear in your RSS newsreader. This saves you time spent returning to these websites to search for the latest updates. The news you want comes to you as it happens, not when you happen to come across it.
The more specific the keyword the more specific the information you receive. For example, an RSS feed on the keyword “China” is going to result in every Olympics build up story, student blog entry, Forbidden City holiday snap and videos of dancing girls in Shanghai nightclubs finding a way into your newsfeed. All of which may be distracting, but a very inefficient way of gathering news.
Be very specific. Use only the names of people, cities, townships, politicians or key phrases commonly associated with the news you want. Be sure to use speechmarks (“”) to “anchor” any phrases or names that contain more than one word. And do so across a range of sites. Here is a very short, and by no means exhaustive, list of some typical sites worth following during news events,
Flickr – For photographs. Search on a keyword and subscribe to the RSS feed.
Google Video – For video uploaded to either Google Video or YouTube.
Technorati – This is a blog search engine. Follow people writing on blogs using keyword search terms.
Global Voices Online – This is a blog aggregator edited by a group of editors scattered around the world. You can subscribe to news from particular regions or countries. Global Voices translate some blog posts into English and other languages.
Delicious – This is a social bookmarking system. Subscribing to a keyword within Delicious allows you to effectively tap into the collective online research of thousands of people.
Google News – This aggregates news from all the main news outlets around the world and you can subscribe to the RSS feed of keyword searches you are interested in.
Social networks – Like Facebook and Bebo. It can be worth searching social networks for groups involved with a news story or talking about it.
Twitter – This is a microblogging tool. You can send and receive short messages from the internet, mobile phone or instant messenger. You can set Twitter to track keywords. Whenever these words are mentioned you receive a message.
The resulting mass of information can be difficult to filter. However, in my experience following the protests in Burma in September 2007 it is an invaluable skill to learn if you need to follow news events very closely and in near real time. Of course, not every tool will be used during every story. For example, during the protests in Burma, Twitter was not used at all from inside Burma. Whereas, a service called CBox, which is popular in Asia, was used to relay eyewitness accounts to the wider world.
Journalists need to know how these tools are being used to relay information and how they can reroute the internet’s plumbing to follow a story. We discuss RSS on the Frontline Club Blogging and Beyond Training Course. However, I am creating a new course for the club, which we will announce soon, to help train journalists how to more efficiently use the internet and RSS to gather news.
This originally appeared in this month’s Frontline Club magazine. If you’re interested in either training course, drop me a line on frontlineblogger at mac dot com.
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 the BBC News website, pondered the problem on the BBC Editorâ€
s blog.
“When is it acceptable for us to make use of personal pictures and video available on the internet? In the past, personal pictures of members of the public who become the subject of news stories (particularly tragic events) have usually only been available if supplied by family or friends.†link
Social networks have changed all this. Many users of these sites upload personal images, some of which are newsworthy, most of which are not, and some of which are fake. The problem is that social networks blur the line between public and private.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007 journalists tried to communicate with users of social networking sites and the popular blogging tool LiveJournal in an attempt to talk to people involved in the event.
In the comments under one particular blog post published on the day of the massacre, journalists from CBC, NPR, Boston Herald, MTV, ABC, The Guardian, In Touch and Triple J can be seen vying for an interview with a student blogger. This has since become known as “digital doorsteppingâ€.
The practice of lifting images and video from these websites is known as “scrapingâ€. In November 2007 the Daily Mail scraped a Facebook group for images of “ladettes who glorify their shameful drunken antics†and they quickly found the forum they wanted.
“More than 150,000 girls have signed up to Facebookâ€
The newspaper published a selection of images taken from the nearly 5,000 they found. And they named the young women in the pictures.
However, all is sometimes not what it seems and a number of newspapers have been fooled by fake Facebook pages. In January, French newspapers fell for the fake Facebook page proclaiming a 28 year-old French man by the name of Arash Derambarsha as the “Worldwide President of Facebookâ€.
In late December 2007, a fake Facebook page of Bilawal Bhutto, the son of assassinated politician Benazir Bhutto, fooled many news outlets including Torontoâ€s Globe and Mail and Agence France Presse. The newspapers quoted fake statements purportedly from Bilawal Bhutto himself including this:“I am not a born leader. I am not a politician or a great thinker. Iâ€m merely a student. I do the things that students do like make mistakes, eat junk food, watch Buffy [the Vampire Slayer] but most importantly of all . . . learn. My time to lead will come but for now Iâ€m the one asking questions, not the one answering them.â€
Although 400,000 UK users left Facebook between December and January, a 5% drop, the site still boasts some 8.5 million users. Bebo claims to have around 10 million users. The sheer numbers of people using these sites is phenomenal. Some argue that the blurring of public and private worlds might eventually mean society evolves an entirely new attitude to the idea of privacy. And as the BBCâ€s Robin Hamman points out on his personal blog www.cybersoc.com what this means for journalism is not yet clear,
“With more and more journalists and researchers using the internet to find first-hand accounts and background material for stories, indeed with some journalists starting to consider social networking sites and blogs part of their reporting patch, itâ€
Republished (with links) from the Frontline Club Magazine.
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