In most cases, authorities have filed vague antistate charges such as “propagation against the regime,” insulting authorities, and disrupting public order. But many cases are shrouded in secrecy, without even formal charges being disclosed.

Some detainees have already been sentenced to lengthy prison terms, lashes, internal exile, and lifetime bans on writing and other social and political activities. The cases of many others are pending. At least two face heresy charges that, upon conviction, would bring the death penalty.

You can find information on each jailed journalists on the CJP website.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal received 10.37% of its US visits from Google News, while it only received 1.41% of its visits from Facebook. The New York Times also received more visits from Google News than Facebook, with 5.21% and 2.96% of visits respectively.

This does not come as a surprise, however. Facebook is basically intended for online social interaction, media (images, videos) sharing, and offers various entertainment focused services. Therefore, it comes only naturally that users link to broadcast sites. Perhaps only a small percentage of Facebook users use their profile to follow newspapers and other online publications.

Google News is exactly the opposite. As we all know, Google unleashes its bots to index content based websites – from newspapers to blogs – to rank them and so on. People visit the aggregator’s site to seek information and their search results will, in most cases, send them to the better indexed online publications. In the same time, Facebook and Google News have complete different profiles. The first is entertainment and the later is information.

Will Facebook send more traffic to newspapers in the future? Questionable. However, I would like to see a similar analysis of Twitter and Google News.

Al Jazeera quoted a couple of statements made by Hakim Ashir, the head of the Government Media and Information Center, who said:

(1)  Journalists are going to the scene of ongoing attacks, they endanger themselves.

(2)  But they also help inform the enemy with their live broadcasts or reporting of the progress of [police] operations.

(1)    Every war correspondent knows that his job is dangerous and assumes responsibility for his or her decision to report on an armed conflict.

(2)    The idea that journalists offer information to terrorists or a nation’s enemies when he or she is on the job is highly debatable. However, this has always been a good excuse to censor the press, to limit its rights and reduce freedom of movement for journalists in a conflict zone. This is why “embbeded reporting” was (re)introduced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But more interesting is a statement made by the National Directorate of Security spokesman, Saeed Ansari:

Live coverage does not benefit the government, but benefits the enemies of Afghanistan

Since when must the press benefit the government? The press has no, or should not have, allegience to the government, regardless of the host country of a media outlet, and it does not benefit directly to the enemy. The press should benefit the citizens who have the constitutional right to know what is happening in their country.

The Afghan constitution guarantees freedom of speech. If Afghanistan wants to become a democratic nation, then it should better follow the constitution.

Politkovskaya never relents, never holds back. Her revulsion for the wild men of the Red Army as they rape and kill, for the corrupt warlords who take over in Grozny, for Vladimir Putin and his value-free Russia, for fellow journalists who play fellow travellers, is constant and corrosive. The BBC Trust would have a “fairness and balance” collywobble if she’d put any of this on air. She almost pleads not to be believed because she is so close to the quagmires of bias. But you also trust what she says, because fact piles unquenchably on fact, name on name, grisly deed on deed.

You can order a copy via Amazon here.

“We have confessions that the British journalist committed offences against Palestinian law, and that harms the security of the country,” Mr Ghsain said, without giving details on who had confessed and under what circumstances.

This comes as a surprise for me because I personally throught that Hamas is trouging for media attention and positive reaction. This is all part of what William S. Lind named the 4th generation warfare (4GW). Thomas X. Hammes continues the 4GW theory arguing that today militant groups try to gain the support and sympathy of the people, locally and internationally. Therefore, wouldn’t  be this move considered as counterproductive?

It may very well be. Personally, I have viewed a number of documentaries on Hamas and, of course, followed the Palestinian Islamist movement in news reports. Not long ago, the militants have sponsered a film. Of course propagandistic, yet it shows that Hamas is getting acquainted with 4GW. The documentaries showed journalists documenting the group’s cause, interviewing high ranking officials in the most remote locations out of fear of an Israeli raid and following the militants, all perhaps in an attempt to create trust between Hamas and the press.

Paul Martin’s arrest, however, comes as a surprise and perhaps suggests that Hamas supports journalists only when they write in their favor. Of course they do.

Patrick Cockburn is a journalist and a veteran war correspondent. He began his carrier as a Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times and the Independent in 1979 and he concentrated on Iraq ever since.

In 2003, just weeks before the US invasion of Iraq, Cockburn made his way to the country. Thanks to a book published in 1999 which was co-authored with his brother Andrew, he did not receive a visa to enter Iraq. The book, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, was not seen well by the Saddam regime. Cockburn writes in The Occupation, that the book did well in the black market, as some Iraqis photocopied the book, multiplied it and then they went on and sold the book. In consequence, Patrick Cockburn had to pass through Syria and into Northern Iraq controlled by the Kurds. Then he crossed the Tigris River by boat and made his way to Baghdad.

For the next three years, Cockburn would report on Iraq for The Independent and after the invasion he started to write for the London Review of Books. He was present when the Saddam regime fell and reported on the anarchy and looting that occurred throughout the country after the invasion. Cockburn writes that American soldiers did not intervene in order to stop the looting and try to install order in the streets of Baghdad. Throughout The Occupation, Cockburn criticizes the steps taken by the Americans to pacify regions of Iraq and eventually the entire country.

Patrick Cockburn’s The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, starts with a brief history of the country in order to emphasize the struggle of the Iraqis until the fall of Saddam Hussein. Cockburn writes on the differences between the Shia and the Sunni as well as their similarities. The author writes on the local tribal politics, a tribe might have both Shia and Sunni members; he informs the reader on the political motivations of the Kurds in Northern Iraq and criticizes the United States for not trying to understand these aspects of Iraq which led to dramatic consequences.

The author shows the rise of subnationalism in Iraq which peaked with the 2005 elections that almost brought the country into civil war. The Sunnis tried to boycott the elections with catastrophic results, the Kurds voted for their representatives, the Shia for the Shia. The results were dramatic. Patrick Cockburn was to stay during this uprising that almost turned into a full civil war and reported on the events. He frequently quotes the opinion of his Iraqi friends or of whom were directly involved, often using anecdotes to portray the events in question.  The book is a fine example of brilliant journalism.

In The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, Patrick Cockburn is very critical of the ways the US occupation of Iraq evolved during 2003 and 2006. The author also displays a very pessimistic outlook at the future of the country. In his view, the invasion will have dire consequences for the United States.

The Occupation is a must read for anybody who wants to go behind the headlines and the optimism displayed by the US and British media and explore the reality of Iraq as described by Patrick Cockburn.

The power of the press is indisputable, especially in wartime. It has become general knowledge that the outcome of the Vietnam War was heavily influenced by correspondents who went beyond military issues and reported the tragic reality of a confusing war. War reporting existed in one way or another since the first group of primitive men tried to kill another group. In fact, the first “reported” battle is that of Kadesh in 1274 BC, when Ramesses II fought the Hittite Empire. The Pharaoh ordered inscriptions detailing the battle on temples in Abydos, Luxor and Karnak[1]. However, highly propagandistic, the hieroglyphs do not account the battle in its full extent. Nor do Caesar’s writings twelve centuries later when he narrates his attept to invade Britain.

Caesar, “who practiced war journalism before it was invented”[2], never intended for De Bello Gallico to have a factual orientation. Perhaps the first real war correspondent, however, was Pheidippides who immediately set for Athens to deliver news of victory after the Greeks defeated the Persians at Marathon[3].

In any case, seeking the beginning of war reporting so far back in history is very dangerous. However tempting it may be, attributing the invention of the (sub)genre to a pharaoh, a Roman general or a humble messenger is mere misunderstanding of history in particular and journalism as a whole.

People have always found a way to get informed on military expeditions, even before Caesar tried war reporting or “Al Gore invented the Internet”, as the saying goes. However, in the late 18^th century and throughout the 19^th, newspapers relied on letters sent by officers directly from the battlefield. The information provided served mostly to the editors who frequently mixed fact with opinion. These letters contained hardly any newsworthy information and presented only one side of the story.

At some point, the editors had enough. They wanted to send somebody who could go beyond the troop maneuvers, attack plans, enemy numbers and similar information provided by the officers. The public demanded to know the real side of war to its full brutality. When The Times finally sent William Howard Russell  to cover the Crimean War in 1854, he wrote a letter to the Times’ editors asking: “Am I to tell these things or hold my tongue?”[4]. With this question, war reporting was born.

[2] Evans, Harold, Reporting in the Time of Conflict, Newseum, http://www.newseum.org/warstories/essay/index.htm

[3] Sekunda, Nick, Marathon 490 BC, Osprey Publishing, 2002, p. 50 – 51

[4] http://www.monitor.upeace.org/archive.cfm?id_article=72

Simple, pragmatic questions like “do the Brits and Bulgarians have similar interests?” are ignored. If we research the matter a little, we’d find out that the British are more interested in foreign policy than the Bulgarians, the later being more concerned with domestic politics. With a mind on this we can simply ask ourselves: “then how can there be the same media?” There are other examples as well: the British public is generally interested in archaeology, the Romanian news consumers are not; the French prefer print newspapers while the Romanians enjoy TV and online publications. In consequence, the media adapts to each country.

The regulations proposed by the EU are pertinent and most welcomed by journalists. However, they do not create, nor even try to establish a single EU media – this is what researchers and media commentators have to understand. We should celebrate diversity, not ignore it.

Mark Gale had been a journalist on the Haywards Heath-based Mid Sussex Times for no fewer than 60 years.

He loved his job as the paper’s music and theatre critic so much he continued to work for nothing following his retirement, coming into the office for two days a week.

“His writing should have earned him a job on the nationals but he was not ambitious and loved his job here so much he never moved on,” said a colleague.

60 years of writing for a single newspaper, isn’t it amazing? This probably takes a lot of commitment, loyalty and modesty. It is also shocking because most journalists migrate from a paper to another due to various reasons or write for multiple publications in the same time.

Indeed, it has become imperative for journalists to be comfortable with social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and other. However, coding is not compulsory for using social networking and perhaps journalists can survive without knowing PHP. The part with “finding out information and building a platform to express it in new ways” does not require coding abilities. If it’s about the content, then a writer can set up a free blog on platforms like Blogger and Wordpress.com and publish materials in no time.

This would bring unimaginable changes to the notion of journalist – the word journalist would become a synonym with blogger, thus narrowing the field of professionalism and, most probably, of ethics as well. In consequence we would have a conglomeration of blogs or one man publications that report on various issues. Most writers prefer to work for an established media outlet which can offer a stable income and not venture themselves in possibly disastrous projects. If the online publication is there, that means that somebody else already took care of the coding of the website. Thus, a person would be hired for his or her writing capabilities rather than coding.

However, if a journalist wants to create a publication then coding is essential. With a mind on the financial aspect, hiring a web designer to make the website is, in most cases, expensive. Nevertheless, blogging platforms like Wordpress or Joomla offer the possibility of creating/editing the website’s interface. Most Wordpress themes or Joomla templates are available for free, but almost never do they satisfy the user’s needs. These are pre-made layouts designed for the general and not the specific. However, in this case, the journalist can save a lot of money if he or she has php coding skills.

To learn how to create a Wordpress theme is relatively easy and does not take much time. The journalist can acquire just general knowledge of the code used for the themes and edit the interface partially or completely. I did exactly this for my blog. I modified the header, inserted the above quote image, added image caption, and edited the typography and so on. I could use a blank Wordpress theme and then make all changes I need. However, my skills in this matter are limited and if I would have a more complex web design project, I’d simply hire a designer (hey, they have to make a living too).

To start a new publication does not require only coding skills, but a series of other skills as well. Design, for logo and website, typography, marketing, SEO and the list goes on. My opinion is that journalists should definitely try to keep up with software related to their trade, but they are writers first.