The 2014 World Press Freedom Index spotlights the negative impact of conflicts on freedom of information and its protagonists. The ranking of some countries has also been affected by a tendency to interpret national security needs in an overly broad and abusive manner to the detriment of the right to inform and be informed.
Category Archives: Did you Know?
Did you know that Facebook offers 56 “custom” gender options?
Did you know that there are all 56 “custom” gender options on Facebook?
Now you do.
First Look Media’s new publication, The Intercept, is live and on the Web
First Look Media’s new publication, The Intercept, is live. It was created by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.
Its short-term mission is to provide a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
While its long-term mission is:
to produce fearless, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues. The editorial independence of our journalists will be guaranteed. They will be encouraged to pursue their passions, cultivate a unique voice, and publish stories without regard to whom they might anger or alienate. We believe the prime value of journalism is its power to impose transparency, and thus accountability, on the most powerful governmental and corporate bodies, and our journalists will be provided the full resources and support required to do this.
via The Intercept.
For more information on First Look Media, watch this video.
The Sochi Project
Learn about Sochi, Russia from The Sochi Project
Rob Hornstra (photos) and Arnold van Bruggen (text) have been working together since 2007 to tell the story of Sochi, Russia, site of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. They have returned repeatedly to this region as committed practitioners of “slow journalism,†establishing a solid foundation of research on and engagement with this small yet incredibly complicated region before it finds itself in the glare of international media attention.
Is Amazon Bad for Books?
Do we need to be worried about Amazon?
It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,†Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else. For Bezos to have seen a bookstore as a means to world domination at the beginning of the Internet age, when there was already a crisis of confidence in the publishing world, in a country not known for its book-crazy public, was a stroke of business genius.
Via the New Yorker