Journalism Today. 2 Dec 2024

By Eduardo Suárez

🗞️ 3 top news stories

1. A Nigerian award-winning journalist under pressure. Fisayo Soyombo is one of the most respected African journalists and an alumnus of our Journalist Fellowship Programme. On Friday he was released after being arrested for three days by a division of the Nigerian army while investigating oil theft. On first first post after being released, he thanked everyone who spoke up about his case, including our Acting Director Mitali Mukherjee. | Read

📚 From our archive. Fisayo spent his time with us working on a project on how journalists are discredited around the world. His piece features several examples of journalists who have faced coordinated campaigns to tarnish their reputations in countries such as Nigeria, Mexico, Libya, Brazil, Pakistan and Azerbaijan. | Read

2. A Chinese journalist, sentenced to seven years in jail. Chinese journalist Dong Yuyu was sentenced on Friday to seven years in prison for charges of espionage. Dong was a senior staff member of the Guangming Daily, a newspaper that’s linked to the Chinese Communist party. He was arrested in 2022 after having lunch with a Japanese diplomat at a restaurant where he often met foreign friends. | Read

• A statement from CPJ: “Interacting with diplomats is part of a journalist’s job. Jailing journalists on bogus and vicious charges like espionage is a travesty of justice,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. | Read
• A statement from the Nieman Foundation: “Dong Yuyu is a talented reporter whose work has long been respected by colleagues in China and abroad and whose routine reporting activities are now unjustly characterized as espionage. We stand with many in hoping for a speedy reversal of this harsh decision so he may return to his family as soon as possible,” said Anne Marie Lipinski, the curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, where Dong was a Fellow in 2007. | Read

3. Canadian news publishers go against OpenAI. A coalition of Canadian news publishers, including The Canadian Press, the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Postmedia and public broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for using news content to train its ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence system. In a joint statement, publishers said that OpenAI regularly breaches copyright by scraping large amounts of content from Canadian media. | Read

• The money quote: “OpenAI is capitalising and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners,” the statement said. The publishers argue that OpenAI practices undermine the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in journalism, and that content is protected by copyright. 

🖼️ The bigger picture. OpenAI is facing lawsuits from other publishers, including the New York Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as bestselling authors such as John Grisham and George R.R. Martin. But the AI company has signed deals with many news publishers, including the Associated Press, News Corp, The Atlantic, Axel Springer, Prisa Media, Le Monde and the Financial Times. | Read

📚 A datapoint from us. As part of our latest Trends and Predictions report, we asked hundreds of media managers what they thought about these kinds of deals and most of them were sceptical. Up to 48% felt that there would be very little money for any publisher and a third (35%) believed that most of the money would go to big companies. | Read

📊 Chart of the day

📱Perceptions of bias. As part of our recent report on public attitudes towards platforms, we asked people in eight countries whether they thought different types of platforms were biased. As the chart shows, their responses varied widely by country. In Brazil, Spain, South Korea, and the US, more people think platforms are systematically biased than not. In Japan, Germany, and Argentina, none of the platforms are seen as systematically biased, with the exception of social media in Argentina (+13). | Read the report 

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The Reuters Institute is seeking a new lead author for the Digital News Report. If you are interested in the role, you’ll find everything to know in this link. The deadline to send an expression of interest is Tuesday 10 December.

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☕ Coffee break

“I couldn’t cry over my children like everyone else,” says Al Jazeera journalist Wael al-Dahdouh in this interview by Nesrine Malik. The piece offers an overview of his heartbreaking journey in the past year. | Read · Listen

An article by Tom Serpell stresses the unhealthy concentration of the British press. “Just three companies, News Corp (Murdoch family), Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT, Viscount Rothermere) and Reach plc, control over 80% of daily newspaper circulation and the owners of the rest include a Russian plutocrat, all answerable to nobody and with no concern for democracy,” he writes. | Read

A British court heard recently that a man spying for Russia in the UK discussed potentially killing Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, the journalist who uncovered Russian links to the 2018 Salisbury attack. | Read

Reddit has overtaken X to become the fifth most popular social media platform in the UK, according to Ofcom, the communications watchdog. Reddit was visited by 22.9 million UK adults in May this year, compared with 22.1 million on X. The figures make Reddit the fastest-growing large social media platform in the UK. | Read

Our Hungarian alumnus Peter Erdelyi spoke recently at a conference gathering 60 news publishers from Central and Eastern Europe. His opening remarks focused on why journalists should adapt to the rise of news influencers. | Read 

📚 One piece from our archive

🤢 A new threat to journalism? Slop is low-quality, often inaccurate AI-generated content and can be found both on social media and on websites purporting to be news outlets, usually with the goal of reaching as many people as possible with the least amount of effort. Is this phenomenon a threat to the news ecosystem? This is the question at the heart of a piece by our own Marina Adami. The article features the views of Professor Sandra Wachter, McKenzie Sadeghi from NewsGuard, and innovation expert David Caswell. | Read

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