Journalism Today. 12 Nov 2024

By Eduardo Suárez and Gretel Kahn

🗞️ 3 top news stories

1. A Ukrainian editor speaks up. Sevgil Musaieva is one of the most respected journalists in Ukraine, the editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda and an alumna of our Journalist Fellowship Programme. In a new interview with Laura Dixon, she opens up about the challenges she and her colleagues have faced after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. | Read

• A quote. ”Eleven colleagues have gone to fight,” Sevgil says. “The 12th, Dana, is 23 years old, brilliant in the environmental and agricultural sphere. I’m thinking she is 23 years old. She’s just a girl. I’m also thinking we will lose our person covering agriculture, and you spend years training a journalist. But I have to just accept it.”

📚From our archive. In February 2023, we published this piece featuring the experiences of three Ukrainians working in the news media, including Ukrainska Pravda’s own CEO, Andrey Boborykin. “We’ve discussed what we could do if Ukraine was cut off from the internet and totally messed up scenarios like a nuclear strike on Kyiv or Russians blowing up a nuclear power plant,” he said. | Read 

2. What’s next for the First Amendment? A new essay by experts Evelyn Douek and Genevieve Lakier looks at a handful of US Supreme Court’s decisions on the future of free speech in the United States. They argue that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the laissez-faire First Amendment presented by these decisions and that it is actually far less absolute and simplistic than is commonly understood. | Read

• A quote. “What the cases made crystal clear,” they write, “was that there is nothing close to majority support on the Court for a doctrine of internet exceptionalism that permits the government, or requires it, to address structural inequalities in the public sphere or to protect users’ speech rights online.

3. How to report on an autocracy. A new piece by award-winning Filipino investigative journalist Sheila Coronel offers 10 tips on how to report on an elected autocracy on the basis of her own experience and of the work of so many journalists from countries such as Egypt, Russia, Hungary and El Salvador. The piece is written with Donald Trump’s victory in mind, but it will be useful for reporters in many other countries. | Read

• Tip number 2. “Do not demonise the autocrat’s supporters. Listen instead to what they are really saying. Understand where they are coming from before you judge. Interrogate their real or imagined grievance, their wounded pride, their perceived loss of privilege and status, and the news deserts and information bubbles they inhabit.”

📚From our archive. In July 2023 we published a similar piece by our journalist Marina Adami, with tips from Hungarian journalist Peter Erdelyi and Indian editor Ritu Kapur. “In environments like ours, choosing to support independent media can be an act of political expression,” Erdelyi said. “But if you want to keep supporters around, you need to provide them with services they really use and take advantage of.” | Read

📊 Chart of the day

A long-term decline for interest in news. Elections have increased interest in the news this year in a few countries, including the United States (+3 points), but the overall trend remains downward. In the last few years, for example, interest in news has fallen dramatically in Spain (-33), Argentina (-32), France (-23), Germany (-19) and the UK (-32), where it has almost halved since 2015. Women and young people make up a significant proportion of this decline. | Read our Digital News Report 

☕️ Coffee break

A New York federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against AI company OpenAI that claimed it misused articles from news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet to train its large language models. | Read 

UK Ministers are considering a bill that would ban children under 16 from using social media. The bill would raise the age at which social media companies would be allowed to collect data on children. | Read

“Tech leaders’ politics are encoded into their platforms – and with Trump’s ascent, they have direct access to the Oval Office,” writes Joan Donovan in an opinion piece for the Guardian. | Read 

The re-election of Donald Trump has been followed by a boost to the share prices of several publicly-traded news businesses, according to an analysis by the Press Gazette which indicates that the market has bet on growth at these companies under the new administration. | Read

📚 One piece from our archive.

The challenges posed by personalisation. Personalisation has become part of our everyday life. But how can we use it to advance public interest journalism? This is the question at the heart of the project by our former Australian Journalist Fellow Laura Gartry, who spent her time in Oxford examining several approaches to personalisation and interviewing experts from academia and from publishers in Australia, Canada, India, Sweden and UK. | Read

• A quote. "Protecting public interest journalism while personalising the news is not just a technical challenge but an ethical one. It requires thoughtful integration of technology with sound editorial judgement and clear principles. If we get it right, there are many rewards to reap," Laura writes in her summary piece.

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