Media notes for the weekend of November 2-3, 2013:
The Russian news agency, Rosbalt, is being closed by the government's media watchdog agency after it featured two YouTube videos (one from a car accident scene, one from the renegade rock band Pussy Riot) with swearing. Der Spiegel said about 60 employees are affected. The agency has 30 days to appeal to the courts or it will be shuttered. The government's most recent media bill this year outlawed swearing as a "misuse of press freedom."
Royal charter or no royal charter to impose regulation, there is a determination by many British newspaper groups to go their own way with a self-policing body. Roy Greenslade, the venerable Guardian media columnist, follows the effort to create the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO). An appointments panel is soon to be named and will then choose the members who will oversee the body. All should be up and running in 2014, if in defiance of the government.
The Los Angeles airport shooting Friday unsurprisingly spurred the same sort of freneticism in media that gripped the travelling public in the facility: speedy reaction, speculation, then correction. A fake Twitter account suggested the former head of the National Security Agency and not a TSA agent) was shot, while other accounts reported the gunman was killed (he wasn't). Dylan Byers of Politico shrugs his shoulders on this and wonders if it's time to stop worrying about media mistakes in breaking news. To discuss his case, he sent out a batch of Tweets and got follower reaction. Adi Robertson and Russell Brandom, writing for The Verge, have a broader look at how the age-old rules of retraction for old media are still taking shape on Twitter, one urgent episode at a time.
The Russian news agency, Rosbalt, is being closed by the government's media watchdog agency after it featured two YouTube videos (one from a car accident scene, one from the renegade rock band Pussy Riot) with swearing. Der Spiegel said about 60 employees are affected. The agency has 30 days to appeal to the courts or it will be shuttered. The government's most recent media bill this year outlawed swearing as a "misuse of press freedom."
Royal charter or no royal charter to impose regulation, there is a determination by many British newspaper groups to go their own way with a self-policing body. Roy Greenslade, the venerable Guardian media columnist, follows the effort to create the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO). An appointments panel is soon to be named and will then choose the members who will oversee the body. All should be up and running in 2014, if in defiance of the government.
The Los Angeles airport shooting Friday unsurprisingly spurred the same sort of freneticism in media that gripped the travelling public in the facility: speedy reaction, speculation, then correction. A fake Twitter account suggested the former head of the National Security Agency and not a TSA agent) was shot, while other accounts reported the gunman was killed (he wasn't). Dylan Byers of Politico shrugs his shoulders on this and wonders if it's time to stop worrying about media mistakes in breaking news. To discuss his case, he sent out a batch of Tweets and got follower reaction. Adi Robertson and Russell Brandom, writing for The Verge, have a broader look at how the age-old rules of retraction for old media are still taking shape on Twitter, one urgent episode at a time.
