Author: OPC of America

The International News Safety Institute has compiled the following checklist for journalists and news crews
covering civil disturbances., although some equipment may not be appropriate for the U.K.

Riots and looting spread in London after a protest organised around the unexplained shooting of a man by Police. While Twitter has largely been the venue of spectators to violence, it would appear BlackBerry BBM messaging network has been the method of choice for organising it.

NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel, along with cameraman Bredun Edwards, have traveled to Somalia, where they are reporting on the devastating
famine. Engel is the second high-profile U.S. correspondent to travel to Somalia in recent weeks, joining ABC’s David Muir, who was in the region in late July.

When the News Corp.-owned Times of London ran a cartoon featuring starving African children pondering the phone hacking scandal, the image won harsh — and well-deserved — criticism.

Baghdad Bureau Manager Salar Jaff was among those let go last week in the paper’s latest round of layoffs, and Celeste Fremon says it’s a big loss. “He has literally saved lives,” a former Baghdad colleague of Jaff’s told Fremon.

Nine months after he lost both legs to a land mine in Afghanistan, a photo by Joao Silva is on the front page of The New York Times.

Insurgents have carried out a gun and bomb attack in the south Afghan town of Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province, leaving at least 22 dead, officials say, including Ahmed Omed Khpulwak, a local BBC reporter.

NYU journalism professor Adam Penenberg writes that the News of the World phone hacking scandal is a sign that the word “hacking” has become a catch-all term for all sorts of computer-related trickery. In many cases, News of the World journalists and investigators simply got phone companies to provide people’s voice mail codes or spoofed victims’ caller IDs.

Newsweek has published some of Tim Hetherington’s final photos taken before he and Chris Hondros were killed in April covering the civil war in Libya. In a short piece accompanying the 12 images, Newsweek photo editor James Wellford writes that the images are significant not only because they’re Hetherington’s last but also because they show how masculinity and war are intertwined.

Social networks have proved to be incredible distribution platforms for real-time news and continue to fascinate journalists as communication tools. It’s no surprise that many media professionals have jumped quickly on the Google+ band wagon to explore its potential for journalism.