How to send stories by carrier pigeon, when to run when you are under fire and the best way to brush off tweets were amongst titbits of information from Alan Cowell’s discussion of his new book ‘The Paris Correspondent.’

Cowell has long been a correspondent with the New York Times, and before that worked for Reuters. This is his third book.

In discussion with Charles Glass, freelance writer and former chief Middle East correspondent with ABC News in Beirut, Cowell says that reporting and producing news has changed for good. The book’s two male protagonists grapple with the fast pace of this change in the news industry. Cowell reads an excerpt:

“News men and newswomen were going down with the ships on which they had once sailed the kindly oceans of expense account lunches, five-star hotels and mortal peril. Print, that great, gorgeous messy alchemy of ink and hot type and whirring reals of paper and working stiffs in stained overalls was expiring, but not quite finished.”

And as Cowell suggests, there is no reason not to reminisce a little about how things used to be:

“I remember in N’Djamena I was doing an interview with [President] Goukouni Oueddei… you had to go across the river to Cameroon to be able to find a phone… and on the bar there, there was a direct dial telephone… located next to an ice bucket where there was always a fresh bottle of champagne…”

“And there was also a curfew… and you had to be poled across the Chari River in a dugout canoe. And I remember saying to President Oueddei, “I’m sorry I’m going to have to cut this short because I have to catch the last pirogue before curfew.”

Those times have gone, says Cowell:

“If you say ‘Is that a more pleasant way of earning a living than slaving over a computer screen all day trying to bat off tweets like mosquitoes?’ Then yes, sure. But we can’t turn the clock back and what we have to do now is… bringing the standards and the values that have always made newspapers sell, into this new era.”

It was in Zimbabwe reporting shortly before independence, that Cowel was able to hone his carrier pigeon sending techniques. With no way to send his stories back he was given a huddle of “cooing carrier pigeons” by the last white mayor of Bulawayo and the last editor of the Bulawayo chronicle.

“…we didn’t know exactly how we were supposed to cope with them and he said look, Sid said “you hold the birds legs between those fingers, you put your thumb over the neck, you give it a little kiss and whisper something nice to it, then you loft it up to the air… And you write the story on a 30 packet of Madison cigarettes – there was a small bit of tissue paper inside and you could write 400 words of spidery script on it.

It is hard to avoid the feeling that news has definitely changed.

Popularly known as the Paris of the Middle East, Lebanon is said to be culturally liberal compared to most Arab countries in the Middle East. However, such is not the belief of Joumana Haddad, a Lebanese journalist and poet based in Beirut. She says, "I feel liberated but I wear a veil."

The documentary "Jasad", meaning "body", is titled after a controversial magazine, founded by Haddad in 2008. The magazine tackles several issues faced by Arab women such as hymenoplasty, homosexuality, eroticism, feminism, sexual health and virginity, usually considered taboo topics and culturally sensitive.

Captivated by the idea while browsing through the quarterly magazine director Amanda Homsi-Ottoson said, "This film was very personal to me. I still remember how I walked into a library one day and saw this magazine and was then very keen to find the woman behind it."

Having questioned several cultural beliefs growing up in a conservative society, she said,  "While I was growing up in Lebanon, this was something I struggled with on a daily basis. Talking to my friends about issues on virginity and sexuality was unthinkable."

"I still look back at some of my early days in my late teens and early twenties and wondered if a lot of people were going through this, I wanted to explore how people felt about this today."

Members of the audience raised several questions on content and were surprised by the wide spread condemnation from the feminists present in the film. 

One said, "I thought the feminist group’s views were contradictory to the ideas of Joumana which was quite surprising. I was shocked when some of the women didn’t agree with what Joumana does. There are more naked women on posters in Beirut. Are women meant to be seen as products? "

Another said, "There is a fine line between artistic and pornographic, will she be disillusioned if people are looking at the pictures and not bother to read the text"

"They may see it as pornography but there are so many beautiful stories. Jasad is trying to help women reconcile with their bodies, “said Ottoson

"Content is about freedom of choice, you have to provoke people to wake them up and make them think about things, people are still stuck in their old ideas and that’s what Joumana is trying to do through her magazine."

It wasn’t long before the aspect of distribution came up. Many thought it was quite surprising distribution of the magazine was not halted by the government in Lebanon, especially after the film ‘Beirut hotel’ was banned in Lebanon last year, for similar reasons.

In its fifth year now, despite several controversies the magazine has a large number of subscribers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Dubai. Haddad cleverly seems to have won the approval of the Ministry of Information and the Journalists Syndicate in Lebanon.

"Allowed by the ministry of information, she said she felt quite fortunate. To her luck, also recently the minister had changed, previously it was someone who was much stricter."

"Lebanon is undergoing a lot of change politically. With the Arab spring and revolution in most gulf countries, one may never know about the future," said Ottoson.

Interestingly, condemnation of Berlusconi’s media involvement was not wholesale. Paolo Mancini, professor at the University of Perugia said:

“Everyone here will expect me to say one thing but I don’t think Berlusconi is controlling the media. It’s overstated.”

“Berlusconi tried to limit freedom of journalists but he did not succeed because there was the opposition press, particularly the print media,” agreed Gianpietro Mazzoleni, University of Milan academic. “RAI 3 constantly make shows that have continued to alert people against Berlusconi.”

Mattia Bagnoli, UK correspondent at the Italian news agency ANSA opposed:

“I must say he controlled much of the Italian media for a long time. We are not talking about news here but we are talking about culture and reality shows. What’s on television is a reflection of what he projects on to Italian people to enjoy life.”

“He had control in the media not only through television but also through print in the form of advertising through his company Mondadori,” he added.

As with all modern European countries, most Italians depend on television for their source of news and information. So was Berlusconi clever in choosing his medium?

Marco Niada, a former London bureau chief of the political and financial Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore, said:

“He knows many Italian people don’t read. He thought without imposing too much influence through papers he could control them through TV. However, he started to be defeated by technology. He was still stuck to terrestrial TV and social media started to take over.”

It didn’t take long for the lurid saga of Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties to surface. An Italian documentary director in the audience, pointed out coverage of the scandal in mainstream Italian TV media was poor, saying most people relied on the internet. Meanwhile a reporter from the Financial Times in the audience defended the Italian news output:

“Don’t make the Italian media sound clandestine. La Repubblica went all out to cover the scandal extensively for days.”

Bagnoli added, “As an Italian news agency we are obliged to cover it impartially and we did.”

The discussion swiftly moved into the future of Italian media, now that Berlusconi is gone. Bagnoli and Mazzoleni weren’t entirely optimistic, as they feel many of the Italian MPs are still linked to Berlusconi.

“Mario Monti is here just to bring the country back from default. They need to rewrite the constitution for RAI,” said Bagnoli.

“The Monti factor is crucial at this point,” said Mazzoleni. “We don’t know about the future but we can guess, Monti will take the opportunity to reform RAI but he will be cautious.”

Coming back to the question of press freedom, Hewlett asked whether a more liberal Italian media is possible in five years. Niada said, “The worst enemies of press freedom are journalists themselves, it will take more than five years.”

As the Leveson Enquiry uncovers more evidence of press corruption in the UK, these words may ring true for the British and Italian news industries alike.

Rupert Murdoch’s positive contributions to the British press as well as the negative effects of his influence were discussed by a Frontline Club panel on phone hacking last night.

Although some of the panelists concluded that the positives might even outweigh them, the negatives are “awfully negative”, said chair Jon Snow, presenter of Channel 4 News.

Ever since the phone hacking scandal exploded earlier this month after the revelation that the News of the World hired an investigator to hack into murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone, Rupert Murdoch’s influence has been unanimously decried.

Much reflection on the value of a reportedly dying empire has followed.

Panellist David Banks, a former Daily Mirror editor who also spent 14 years working for News Corp, said:

He begat a whole generation of journalism that we may not approve of. He pushed boundaries. I can divorce Rupert Murdoch from his power base. I rather like the man.

Without Murdoch quality papers like the Times and the Sunday Times would not exist today, added panellist Toby Young, a journalist for the Spectator and Daily Telegraph Snow pointed out the role Murdoch played in promoting premiership football and bringing satellite TV to millions of homes.

However, Jane Martinson, women’s editor at the Guardian, who until recently was media editor, said she Murdoch should not be discussed in extremes:

Rupert Murdoch as a bogeyman has not been the case for some years. [But] I wouldn’t go as far as to say the man is a saviour.

After many years in thrall to the Murdoch empire politicians finally called both Rupert and his son James Murdoch to account last week. Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust and founder of the Hacked Off campaign, said politicians felt able to speak against Murdoch only after the revelations about Milly Dowler emerged.

When we went with the Dowlers to see the party leaders. They were remarkable, dignified … You could see the leaders [more] emboldened than they were before. They believed it was wrong and they had the public behind them.

The panel also discussed what had created the culture that led to widespread illegal activity. David Banks said the disappearance of the old, grey-haired editor-in-chief with a pipe and a strong moral code had resulted in a more reckless culture:

It is no coincidence that the last four or five editors of the Sun have all come from the showbusiness route. They have been quite young. No ethical background. No sense of someone behind them saying, ‘you can’t do that’.

In response to the panel’s comments about tabloid newsroom culture, James Anslow, a fomer News of the World employee who was in the audience,said the phone hacking scandal had surprised him.

“The idea that this is a culture that has been infected is hyperbole. I know of no ‘don’t ask, don’t tell policy’,” he said.

The role of press regulation has come under much scrutiny as a result of the phone hacking revelations. However, there was concern about the future of newspaper journalism if statutory regulation moving towards statutory regulation would be detrimental to journalism, argued Toby Young:

If journalism becomes wholly professionalised it becomes much harder to speak truth to power. We are not going to have quite such an energetic, rambunctuous media.

But Martin Moore said rather than statutory regulation a more “concise privacy law and first ammendment-style defense” should be developed. Such a stronger public interest defense would embolden journalists and solve the problem of what do when private or sensitive information is published online.

Review by Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi