International News Safety Institute update: June 2012
June 27, 2012 3 Comments
The UN Special Rapporteur Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Christof Heyns, said that journalists should be given special protection because of rising levels of impunity at a conference in Geneva this month (UN)
• INSI has recorded the deaths of 73 journalists and media staff in the first half of 2012, with a further 23 cases under investigation. In June, a number of conferences, talks and debates were held around the world to explore ways to improve the safety of journalists.
Anyone can be a journalist, but they need to be protected
July 19, 2012 1 Comment
By Eric Matthies
A shot of protests in 2011, Baniyas, Syria. Citizen journalists have been risking their lives to document the violent unrest in the country. (Syria Frames of Freedom/Flickr)
It’s been seven years since US-based Slate magazine declared – Who Is a Journalist? Anybody who wants to be. The conversation is far from over.
The media critic Jay Rosen has gone to great lengths to identify ‘acts of journalism’ as indiscriminant of the accreditation of the person reporting. In fact, the argument that bloggers are not journalists is one that should long have been put to rest.
The importance of acts of journalism carried out by civilian or otherwise self-declared correspondents has never been more prevalent in today’s news ecosystem. Take the conflict in Syria, where the local people picked up video or smart phone technologies and conveyed the news.
It should almost go without saying that they are at great risk for their bravery.
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Filed under Advisories, Comment, Guest Posts, INSI Blog Tagged with advisory, Arab Spring, blogger, Christof Heyns, citize journalist, citizen journalism, civil unrest, local journalists, Syria, technology, United Nations