The Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago joins with other journalists and media workers around the world in celebrating World Press Freedom Day.
Freedom of the press, a right enshrined in the constitution of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, is something that most of us take for granted.
The World Association of Newspapers announced today that a total of 110 journalists were killed in the line of duty across the globe in 2006, while Reporters without Borders reports that so far for 2007, 24 journalists have lost their lives and 190 journalists and cyber dissidents have been imprisoned.
While none of these deaths occurred in our twin island republic, we are still concerned about several local incidents in which journalists have been threatened, or physically attacked. We are particularly concerned that our rights as journalists are at risk of being infringed in an election year.
We see any attack against media workers as disturbing, and a direct threat to our democracy.
MATT is of the belief that without a free press, there cannot be true democracy.
It is for this reason we are concerned about the new draft constitution and the vague language that surrounds the issue of press freedom.
The Media Association will be meeting with Sir Ellis Clarke in the near future to air these concerns and seek clarification.
MATT is calling on all journalists and media workers to actively work to protect these rights and also to remember our responsibility to our publics to provide fair and balanced coverage of local and global events.

Trinidad Express
January 30, 2007

“A DREAM come true” was how Rachael Forde described the Trinidad Express journalism internship programme, which was launched at Express House, Port of Spain yesterday.

She was one of nine interns who started the 20-week programme which will expose them to all aspects of journalism from news writing to graphic design.

In welcoming the group, Craig Reynald, chief executive officer of Caribbean Communications Network (CCN), parent company of the Express, said he was pleased to see there were still young people enthusiastic about the field of journalism.

The interns were taken on a tour of Express House for a firsthand look at the company’s operations.

They were particularly interested the workings of the pressroom.

Express editor Alan Geere and managing editor Omatie Lyder, who herself entered the profession as an intern, warned that working as a journalist wasn’t all glamour but was filled with daily challenges.

CCN’s human resources manager Cassandra Patrovani-Smith told the interns that passion was the key to achieving their goals.

The lone male in the group, Peter Christopher, said he had always wanted to be a journalist and was relishing the fact that he now had a real opportunity to become one.

John Hooper in Rome
January 29, 2007
Media Guardian

Late last May, a court reporter from the conservative Italian daily Libero and the paper’s deputy editor, Renato Farina, went to see two prosecutors leading an inquiry that was making headline news.

The prosecutors had been trying to get at the truth behind the disappearance from Milan four years ago of a radical Muslim cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as “Abu Omar”. They had already concluded he was seized in a so-called “extraordinary rendition”, organised by the CIA with the help of the Italian secret services. He is thought to have been flown out of Italy from a US base and jailed and tortured in Cairo. Today, committal proceedings are to reopen in Milan in which 35 people, including 26 CIA officers, face charges linked to the affair.

What neither of the journalists knew as the door of the prosecutors’ office closed behind them was that their conversation would be secretly taped – and that one of them, Farina, would end up charged with aiding and abetting a kidnapping.

The interview was the turning point in an affair that has ripped through the Italian media, devastating the careers of two leading journalists and prompting a daily newspaper to be raided by police. Above all, though, it has spotlighted an issue of concern to journalists everywhere – the fraught relationship between reporters and intelligence officers.

Tipped off by police, the two prosecutors interviewed by Farina suspected the information he was demanding was not intended solely for his readers. Raids last July on Libero’s offices in Milan and a Rome apartment provided the evidence they were seeking. The apartment was an undeclared annexe of Italy’s military intelligence service, SISMI. It contained thousands of files on politicians, prosecutors, judges, journalists and even business executives apparently considered by SISMI as “enemies within”.

Telephone conversations involving intelligence officials intercepted on the orders of the prosecutors indicated Giuseppe D’Avanzo of the liberal daily La Repubblica had been followed by SISMI officers while on an assignment connected with the Abu Omar affair.

The annexe also contained papers detailing the service’s routine contacts with reporters from other media outlets. In general, those links were entirely proper. But not always. Last December, the Order of Journalists, which controls membership of the profession, imposed a 12-month suspension on another La Repubblica journalist, Luca Fazzo. He had earlier admitted to his editor that he tipped off SISMI to exclusive reports on the Abu Omar affair.

Most sensationally, though, what the documents showed was that Renato Farina was a paid SISMI agent – recruited despite a 1977 law that forbids the intelligence services from employing journalists. In an emotional confession in Libero, Farina admitted: “I gave a hand to our military secret services. I passed them information.” He depicted his collaboration as the response of a patriot and devout Roman Catholic to the outbreak of what he termed “the fourth (sic) World War, that unleashed by Osama bin Laden”.

In a statement to prosecutors, Farina said he first flirted with the world of espionage as a correspondent in Serbia for Il Giornale. He claimed to have been a go-between for the Italian government with Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic. In 2004 he was recruited by SISMI’s former director, Nicolo Pollari. “We spoke for five or six hours”, the interrogation transcript records, “after which I … It’s as if I fell in love with Pollari”.

Farina admitted to receiving about €30,000 – plus free World Cup tickets – in the two years he was an agent. But he said he had given the money away to charity. A lot had just been left in the basilica of St Mary Major in Rome.

He claimed to have helped free Italian hostages in Iraq and said that, when he was invited to Qatar for a conference organised by al-Jazeera, SISMI officers asked to fit a micro-camera to his spectacles so he could film a video held by the TV station showing the death of an Italian kidnap victim. He refused, feeling it would be a betrayal of his host’s trust. The Order of Journalists dismissed his explanations for what he had done. Imposing a 12-month suspension on Farina, it said he had “betrayed the journalistic profession”, “compromised his dignity and that of the Order to which he belongs, damaging too the relationship of trust that ought to exist between the press and its readers”. According to judicial sources, the prosecution in the Abu Omar trial is considering a plea bargain with Farina under which he will receive a nine-month suspended sentence. His lawyer did not return calls.

Published in Trinidad Guardian
January 21, 2007

The gee-whiz showpiece achievement for the PNM’s election campaign will not be the rapid rail, the water taxis, the Waterfront and Government Campus high-rises, nor any aluminium plant.

By the ringing of the election bell some time after Carnival and cricket, all of the above will still be construction sites or computer-generated images, advertising where the ruling party wants to go rather than a triumphant “Been there, done that.”

The all-seeing radar, attack helicopters, fast patrol vessels, the blimp and the eyes-in-the-sky will represent “assets” deployed in the struggle against crime.

But neither the bulging package itself nor any single part of it can be held up as a match-winner in the contest against crime.

The clear-cut electoral selling point of this Manning administration, appearing yet to be only test-marketed, is the building and delivery of houses.

“My home is my sanctuary,” croons the copy of a full-page HDC advertisement, which foregrounds a smiling, well-fed, thirty-ish couple of suitably indeterminate racial origin: new home owners, living proof of PNM housing performance beating opposition ole talk any time.

Possession of place is tangible and indisputable. But given the assorted anxieties now besetting ordinary life in T&T, the advertisers use a tentative fine print for the credit line: “The Housing Development Corporation providing you with peace of mind.”

Not even a new government house can reliably bring peace of mind to the Mr and Ms Biswas of today, the descendants of VS Naipaul’s epic yearning for a house of one’s own.

But an HDC house is still a home. By the close of its term, this PNM administration should be able to point to tens of thousands of people now more securely and comfortably housed than they had been six years ago.

This success story, in the well-founded fear of the opposition parties, may well prove electorally decisive.

Should that happen, and if any fairness remains in the world, individual credit is owed to Housing Minister Keith Rowley. It is he who has led a literally scorched-earth campaign to fulfill the PNM 2002 campaign pledge of building 10,000 houses a year in answer to the 90,000 applications the HDC claims to have received.

At least for now, Dr Rowley and the HDC have backed off the monumentally ambitious, and equally contentious, plan to evacuate and rebuild east Port-of-Spain.

Elsewhere, people have been sniffing loudly at the Rowley-HDC footprints appearing on empty land in their neighbourhoods.

Residents near Aberdeen Park in Chaguanas have been worrying aloud whether their new neighbours will be people decanted from east Port-of-Spain.

In the new mood of “not in my backyard” people are dreadfully suspicious of newcomers being brought in to meet the undeclared objectives and effects of a social engineering implied by the large house-building plans.

Referring to protests against 149 homes being planted on the slopes of Fort George, Dr Rowley last week hit back at “snobbery” on racial, social, or geographic grounds.

He has been taking the blows publicly, while hardly enjoying the unmixed appreciation of his party.

The unfairness of it all has bestirred an ancient PNM retainer publicly to cry foul. Ferdie Ferreira is secure enough in his PNM credentials to challenge reigning tendencies. His letter in the daily papers has been calling attention to Dr Rowley as a possessor of rare “party political assets” now being imprudently disregarded.

Mr Ferreira’s letter was published around the same time a newspaper photo showed Prime Minister Patrick Manning scarce deigning to rise from his chair to shake the hand of his Housing Minister arriving for the Balisier House media party.

If Dr Rowley’s situation qualifies for the descriptor “embattled,” it is so far only the venerable Mr Ferreira who has publicly taken his side.

Just before Christmas, the minister had been as startled as Mr Ferreira had been scandalised to learn from the Sunday Guardian the Fraud Squad is investigating if his family’s Landate housing development may have benefited from the Scarborough hospital construction.

The Landate-Scarborough link had been probed by a commission of inquiry appointed by Mr Manning promptly after UNC allegations. The inquiry did not identify any smoking-gun evidence, but expressed tendentious disquiet about Dr Rowley’s role.

“This, however, appears not to have satisfied his detractors both inside and outside the party,” Mr Ferreira wrote, condemning the appearance of “an endless witch hunt.”

It is witching and bitching time inside the PNM, other reports say. On December 20 a “Newsday Reporter” story said, “There is definitely a question mark over the political future of (Dr Rowley) who may be a no-show in the next general elections.”

Expanding on roiling insiders’ intrigue, the story added that two names were being talked about as possible candidates for Diego Martin West, Dr Rowley’s seat. Last week, Attorney General John Jeremie denied personal interest in seeking the nomination.

Investigations and rumours of investigations, used so effectively against UNC figures, have now extended a damaging reach to someone as highly placed among the PNM’s top brass as Dr Rowley.

The UNC, who know a good thing when they see it, have pounced. Nariva MP Harry Partap has goaded Mr Manning to take as hard a line with Dr Rowley as he had done with Basdeo Panday and Chief Justice Sat Sharma:

“We want him to stop protecting miscreants in his Government,” said Mr Partap in a strategically targeted broadside.

A UNC hatchet man thus makes effective common cause with anti-Rowley combatants inside the PNM. A party hardly brimming with talent and ability is contemplating, to Ferdie Ferreira’s dismay, the casting aside of the proven “assets” and resources in Dr Rowley.

This close to elections, the political consequences of the Fraud Squad gumshoes’ tramping and poking around the Rowleys’ Landate estate represent somebody’s exercise in brinkmanship.

For now, the result is an increasingly engaging sideshow to the larger drama of a deadly power politics.

CARIMAC and the Environmental Sustainable Development Unit (ESDU) of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) have produced a brand new toolkit to help OECS environmental officers and other advocates become more active and effective in their relationship with the media and use of various communication tools. This 110-page guide is designed for environmental officers with planning functions but it will prove useful to persons involved in general advocacy communication.
The inspiration for the toolkit came from the need to address environmental peculiarities in OECS islands which are linked to leveraging sustainable development in the islands. “The contents of the kit are based on the need for the people of the region to understand and appreciate the importance to their own lives of a clean and healthy environment, and to encourage them to act responsibly in the protection of their environment and the sustainable development of their communities,” reads the toolkit’s Introduction.
The toolkit is divided into eight chapters covering:
Chapter 2: the parameters for advocacy communication; media advocacy and campaign development
Chapter 3: the intricacies of planning a communication strategy
Chapter 4: six case studies of communication plans from islands within the OECS
Chapter 5: hints on how to use media efficiently in the communication plan
Chapter 6: strategies for addressing communication issues with colleagues
Chapter 7: opportunities for using the techniques, suggestions and guidelines outlined in the toolkit
Chapter 8: evaluation criteria for the toolkit. This chapter is also available on CD.
A set of appendices which include a directory of OECS media contacts is also provided.
Toolkit for Communication Planning is a joint publication of CARIMAC and the OECS and is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency through its Environment and Capacity Development Project (ENCAPD).

by Mitchell Stephens
Columbia Journalism Review

Call it the morning letdown. Your muffin may be fresh, but the newspaper beside it is decidedly stale.

“Chavez bashes Bush on UN stage” reads the headline, to pick one morning’s example, on the lead story of The Miami Herald. That was a Thursday in September. But Yahoo, AOL, and just about every major news Web site in the country had been displaying that story — President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela had called President Bush “the devil” — since around noon on Wednesday. The news had been all over the radio, all over cable, too: Fox News had carried, with gleeful indignation, twenty-three minutes of the speech live. Indeed, when Katie Couric introduced the Chavez story on the CBS Evening News, at 6:30 Wednesday, her audience may have experienced an evening letdown. By then — half a day before Chavez’s name would appear in newsprint in Miami — his entry on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, had been updated to include an account of the speech in the United Nations.

Editors and news directors today fret about the Internet, as their predecessors worried about radio and TV, and all now see the huge threat the Web represents to the way they distribute their product. They have been slower to see the threat it represents to the product itself. In a day when information pours out of digital spigots, stories that package painstakingly gathered facts on current events — what happened, who said what, when — have lost much of their value. News now not only arrives astoundingly fast from an astounding number of directions, it arrives free of charge. Selling what is elsewhere available free is difficult, even if it isn’t nineteen hours stale. Just ask an encyclopedia salesman, if you can find one.

Mainstream journalists can, of course, try to keep retailing somewhat stale morning-print or evening-television roundups to people who manage to get through the day without any contact with Matt Drudge, Wolf Blitzer, or Robert Siegel. They can continue to attempt to establish themselves online as a kind of après AP — selling news that’s a little slower but a little smarter than what Yahoo displays, which is essentially what The Washington Post and The New York Times were up to when, about four or five hours after Chavez had left the UN podium, they published, online, their own accounts of his speech.

But another, more ambitious option is available to journalists: They could try to sell something besides news.

The notion that journalists might be in a business other than the collection, ordering, and distribution of facts isn’t new. In the days when the latest news was available to more or less anyone who visited the market or chatted in the street, weekly newspapers (at the time, the only newspapers) provided mostly analysis or opinion — something extra. The growth of cities, the arrival of dailies, and the invention of swift fact-transmitting and fact-distributing machines (the telegraph and the steam press) encouraged the development of companies devoted to the mass production and sale of news. Their day lasted more than a hundred years. But the sun is setting.

Information is once again widely available to more or less everyone, and journalists, once again, are having difficulty selling news — at least to people under the age of fifty-five. If news organizations, large and small, remain in the business of routine newsgathering — even if they remain in the business of routine newsgathering for dissemination online — the dismal prophesy currently being proclaimed by their circulation and demographic charts may very well be fulfilled.

“If we don’t do the basic reporting, who will?” journalists counter. Here’s John S. Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, presenting, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, this notion of mainstream journalists as the indispensable Prime Movers: “Newspapers dig up the news. Others repackage it.” But the widely held belief that the Web is a parasite that lives off the metro desks and foreign bureaus of beleaguered yet civic-minded newspapers and broadcast news organizations is a bit facile.

For much of their breaking news, Yahoo and AOL often tap the same source as Drudge and WashingtonPost.com: The Associated Press, with Reuters, AFP, and a few others also playing a role. (Most of the early online Chavez reports linked to an AP story.) Nothing said here is meant to imply that the wire services, and whatever cousins of theirs may materialize on the Web, should stop gathering and wholesaling news in bulk.

However, the Web increasingly has other places to turn for raw materials: more and more cameras are being aimed at news events, and transcripts, reports, and budgets are regularly being placed on the Web, either by organizations themselves or by citizens trying to hold those organizations to account. We are still very early in the evolution of the form, but surely industrious bloggers won’t always need reporters to package such materials before they commence picking them apart. Mainstream journalists are making a mistake if they believe their ability to collect and organize facts will continue to make them indispensable.

There will continue to be room, of course, for some kinds of traditional, thoroughly sourced reporting: exclusives, certainly. Investigations, certainly. That’s something extra. Yahoo isn’t in a position to muckrake.

But the extra value our quality news organizations can and must regularly add is analysis: thoughtful, incisive attempts to divine the significance of events — insights, not just information. What is required — if journalism is to move beyond selling cheap, widely available, staler-than-your-muffin news — is, to choose a not very journalistic-sounding word, wisdom.

Here’s more historical precedent: In the days when dailies monopolized breaking news, slower journals — weeklies like The Nation, The New Republic, Time — stepped back from breaking news and sold smart analysis. Now it is the dailies, and even the evening news shows, that are slow. Now it is time for them to take that step back.

Insights into the significance of news events certainly do appear on one page or another in our dailies, in one segment or another on our evening newscasts; but a reader or viewer has no reason to believe that they will be there on any particular story on any particular day. It’s hit or miss. And outside of the small patch of the paper that has been roped off for opinion, the chances of coming upon something that might qualify as wisdom are not great. Most reporters have spent too long pursuing and writing “just the facts” to move easily into drawing conclusions based on facts. Their editors have spent too long resisting the encroachment of anything that is not carefully sourced, that might be perceived as less than objective, to easily welcome such analyses now.

So you sometimes get, under a “news analysis” slug or not, pieces that construct their insights out of the unobjectionably obvious — proclaiming that “some” have “voiced concerns,” that “developments” may have “profound ramifications,” but “on the other hand” “it is too soon to tell.” And you find situations as odd as this: In a column in June 2006, David Brooks of The New York Times introduced his “War Council” — the “twenty or thirty people” who, because of the soundness of their “judgments” and “analysis,” he turns to for wisdom about Iraq. One of those people works at Brooks’s own paper: the “übercorrespondent” — currently Baghdad bureau chief — John F. Burns. Brooks included two quotes from Burns about Iraq in his column, including: “I’d have to say the odds are against success, but they are better now than they were three months ago, that’s for sure.’’ However, neither of those quotes was taken from the newspaper that employs Burns, where he ventures beyond the facts only rarely and very cautiously. Instead they were comments Burns made on the PBS program Charlie Rose.

“We would be of little value in our television appearances,” Burns acknowledges, “if we offered no more than a bare-bones recitation of events, without any attempt to place them in a wider context, and to analyze what they mean.” But shouldn’t the same standard of “value” apply to Burns’s appearances in his newspaper? He denies that Times reporters “are muzzled in conveying the full range of our experience and impressions” under the proper rubrics in the paper. Nonetheless, the “impressions” from this Times correspondent that most interested a Times columnist had not originally appeared in the Times itself.

The Wall Street Journal got a taste of this the-best-stuff-doesn’t-make-the-paper problem two years ago when an e-mail found its way onto the Web from one of its reporters in Iraq, Farnaz Fassihi. It proved not only more controversial but arguably more interesting than the stories Fassihi had been filing from that country. For in this e-mail, intended to be private, Fassihi wrote in the first person and she noted what things looked like to her: “For those of us on the ground,” she said, “it’s hard to imagine what if anything could salvage [Iraq] from its violent downward spiral.”

Outside the strictures of mainstream journalism, Fassihi, in other words, did not have to attempt the magic trick American reporters have been attempting for a hundred years now: making themselves and their conclusions disappear.

The switch to a new product line is moving forward at a pretty good pace on the pages of at least two newspapers — one large and foreign, one small and local.

The Independent is a serious English national daily in a market with three other serious national dailies. So the Independent, looking for an edge, has begun devoting most of its front page, weeklylike, to a single story — a story covered with considerable perspective and depth, a story in which the paper is not shy about exhibiting a point of view. The Independent weighed in recently, for example, on the debate on global warming with this headline, and a picture of a large wave, dominating its front page: “Tsunami hits Britain: 5 november 2060.”

Simon Kelner, the paper’s editor in chief, explains that his understanding of the situation of the daily newspaper “crystallized” during coverage in England of the American presidential election in 2004. The Independent reported and interpreted the results along with the other papers. “It was a really expensive, exhaustive exercise for us all,” Kelner recalls. Yet the next morning newsstand circulation actually fell. For up-to-the-minute results people had turned instead to the radio, television, and the Internet. However, he explains, “The next day The Independent published twenty-one pages of analysis and interpretation of the election — and we put on fifteen percent in sales.”

Kelner got the message. “The idea that a newspaper is going to be peoples’ first port of call to find out what’s going on in the world is simply no longer valid. So you have to add another layer: analysis, interpretation, point of view.” Kelner now dubs his daily a “viewspaper.”

Compare the Independent’s response to a visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East with that of The Washington Post. The Post reported on a joint press conference she held with the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, on page A26 under this headline: “Rice cites concern for Palestinians, but low expectations mark visit.” The Independent, that same morning, emblazoned this headline on its front page: “The road map to nowhere: four years after George Bush unveiled his Middle East plan, Condoleezza Rice arrived to find peace as far away as ever.”

It is not that shocking, by European standards, that the Independent has been saying what it thinks; what is fresh and vital is the magazine-like boldness and focus (think The Economist) with which it is saying it. Beneath the road map to nowhere headline on its front page, the Independent displayed a map of Jerusalem. Around the map were arranged five short items — each divided into the promise (headlined in red) and what happened — in which the paper compared what the Bush administration had claimed for its “road map for peace” with the little, nothing, or worse (the Lebanon war was mentioned), it has achieved. Inside the paper, an article combined the history of the Bush Middle East plan with a report on Secretary Rice’s current, seemingly futile visit to the region. Such a mix of graphic, list, and article — of news event, wider focus, and point of view — is now typical for the Independent.

Producing such a paper certainly makes for an interesting newsroom. “Our competitors each select the best news story of the day,” notes John Mullin, the Independent’s executive editor for news. “What we try to do is something much more holistic. We try to capture the entire feel of something. It makes life much more — some would say difficult, some would say rewarding.” Mullin adds that the effort to present a big chunk of news with a coherent viewpoint can be particularly “challenging” for journalists who are “used to thinking in the time-honored fashion: who, what, when and where.”

Nowhere in the world has that fashion been as honored, and for such a long time, as it has been in the United States. Mainstream journalists in America today live in fear of the charge of bias. To achieve more vigorous analysis, they may have to get over that fear. After all, opinions — from “these are the times that try men’s souls” to ford to city: drop dead — have, historically, managed to hold their own with facts as ways of understanding the world. And it’s not as if there aren’t things besides the effort to be balanced for which journalists might stand. Old-fashioned reason might, for example, do, too.

Journalists also might stand for honesty. Sure, the analytic journalist can prove wrong: Burns, on Charlie Rose, had one take on the situation in Iraq; in her e-mail Fassihi, writing at a different time, had another. But there is something to be said for being openly right or wrong rather than hiding an assessment behind the carefully choreographed quotes of various named and unnamed sources.

No one is suggesting that reporters pontificate, spout, hazard a guess, or “tell” when it is indeed “too soon to tell.” No one is suggesting that they indulge in unsupported, shoot-from-the-hip tirades. “It’s not like talk radio,” explains one of the champions of analytic journalism, Mike Levine, executive editor of the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York. But it’s not traditional American journalism either. Levine, a former columnist, had noticed that the analyses reporters unburdened themselves of in conversations in the newsroom were often much more interesting than what ended up in the paper. Some of that conversation is mere loose talk and speculation, of course. Yet “walk into any newsroom in America,” Levine says, “turn the reporters upside down, and a hundred stories will come falling out. They know so much about the communities they cover, but they don’t get it in the newspaper.”

When he took over the Times Herald-Record in 1999, Levine was determined to change that. “We simply asked reporters to give the readers the benefit of their intelligent analysis,” he explains. This means paying less attention to the mere fact that a hospital administrator resigned in nearby Sullivan County. It may even mean leaving the account of the resignation to the paper’s Web site. It definitely means more attention, in the paper, to what that resignation might signify.

“We’re not the infantry anymore,” Levine explains. “We don’t just go out to board meetings and take dictation. That’s not really much of a contribution to the community. What are needed are journalists who can connect the dots.” Levine, in other words, is not afraid of letting his reporters — after they’ve done the reporting, when they know as much about a subject as most of their sources — find meaning in the dots.

Accomplishing this at a newspaper that may not be at the top of the hiring ladder has required, in Levine’s words, relying on “some experienced people devoted to community journalism”; it has required finding and hiring some young reporters who are “curious” enough not to “shut down inquiry” and surrender to what Levine calls “a stale, petrified ‘objectivity.’” But Levine adds, “not every reporter on staff does this kind of reporting. We’re evolving into it.”

Here is an example of what happens when journalists do Levine’s kind of reporting, from a multipart Times Herald-Record series by the reporters Tim Logan and John Doherty, on a renaissance in the city of Newburgh:

“The city is shaking off three decades of inertia. It’s an exciting time. The real-estate market is hot. City politics are more harmonious. And there are plans galore. Plans for a community college on lower Broadway, plans for the long-empty stretch of land on Water Street, a master plan under way for the city as a whole. But there’s no plan for the city’s poor . . . . If this city is truly going to rebuild, if it will ever fill the void at its heart, if it can transform itself from a drain on the rest of Orange County into the thriving hub the county desperately needs, Newburgh can no longer ignore its poverty.”

Note: That’s not, “Some observers suggest Newburgh can no longer ignore its poverty.” Nor is that an editorial or a column. The point is being made in news pages, at a small, local newspaper, by journalists — based on what they have learned on their beats (the Times Herald-Record employs a traditional, geography-based beat structure), and based on their own reasoned and informed appraisal of the situation.

Burned-out reporters can be forgiven for dreaming that the coming of this analyzing and appraising will lead to a life of leisurely speculation. But, alas, more industrious reporting, not less, will be required. You’d better know an awful lot about plans for rebuilding Newburgh before you contemplate criticizing those plans. Getting at the meaning of events will demand looking beyond press conferences, escaping the pack, tracking down more knowledgeable sources, spending more time with those who have been affected, even seeking out those whom Levine of the Times Herald-Record calls “the invisible people — people who are not at board meetings who may not even show up at the voting booth.” When Levine took over, his paper began a “sourcing project,” designed to force reporters to avoid “going to the same three or four sources [for] every story.” More and more diverse sources, the theory goes, should improve story ideas and stories, and help reporters know more when they say what they know.

Strategies developed at the Times Herald-Record might be of use at larger papers, too. As a source of timely and important analysis, our journalistic heavyweights are simply not — on a day-to-day, story-to-story basis — reliable. We will know that they have grasped their role in this staler-than-your-muffin news world only when they realize that being fast with the analysis is as important today as being fast with the news has been for the last hundred years.

For that to happen, our major news organizations — we need to begin thinking of them as “news-analysis organizations” — will have to develop a stable of knowledgeable analysts whom they can assign each day to the major stories — as they currently assign reporters. Some of these “wisdom journalists” might be obtained through raids on think tanks and weeklies. Smaller papers, less able to filch an expert on urban issues from the Brookings Institution, might regularly borrow some analytic talent from the less jargon-infested corners of local universities. But daily news-analysis organizations must also develop their own career path for analysts.

Working your way up through the metro desk, the Washington bureau, and a few overseas beats certainly has its value, but it does not necessarily qualify you for untangling the underlying causes of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Some extensive university training might. News-analysis organizations will have no more room for the sort of scholars who never leave the library or their laptops than they’ll have room for the sort who stuff sixty words, two of them unfamiliar, into a sentence. “I have a degree in East-Asian studies,” Susan Chira, foreign editor of The New York Times, states. “But when I went to Asia myself and lived there, I found out a lot of things my teachers didn’t know.” We will continue — in journalism, not academic journals — to need theory to be tested and illuminated by experience, including on-the-street, eyes-open, with-the-victims experience. But an ability to go and get is simply no longer sufficient. The best journalistic organizations are going to be selling the best thinking on current events — and that often is furthered by deep, directed study.

The old saying is that reporters are only as good as their sources. We will require many more journalists who, when occasion demands, are better than their sources, journalists who are impeccably informed. Let’s call this one of the five I’s — a guide to what journalists need to be, now that at least four of the old five W’s are more widely and easily available. Intelligent would be another, along with interesting and a holdover from the previous ethos: industrious. But the crucial quality is probably insightful.

It is significant how many of the most respected names in the history of journalism — from Joseph Addison to Dorothy Thompson and Tom Wolfe, from Charles Dickens to Ernie Pyle and I.F. Stone — were, indeed, known for stories that were exhaustively reported, marvelously written, and often startlingly insightful. The disruptions caused by the new news technologies will prove a blessing if they allow journalists to stop romanticizing the mere gathering and organization of facts and once again aspire to those qualities.

Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York University, is the author of A History of News.

“Ignoring the British Ambassador’s advice, I asked the President whether it was a very Arab thing to do to invade and rape a neighbouring country.

“He did better than I expected. While his ministers rocked back in their seats, he feigned amusement at the sharpness of the inquiry and asked in return whether it was a very English thing to do.”

The President was Saddam Hussein. The interviewer was Trevor McDonald who, to use his word, served his “apprenticeship” at Radio Trinidad until 1969.”

From George John’s column in today’s Trinidad Express. Check out the full text here .

Deadline: 11/01/2007

Details: Annual award, organised by World Press Photo, will reward the best photographers from around the globe. To be eligible all pictures most been taken by a professional photographer within 2006.

Categories include: General news, daily life and people in the news.

Sponsors include: TNT, Canon and Nationale Postcode Loterij

Address: Jacob Obrechtstraat 26, 1071 KM Amersterdam, The Netherlands

Telephone: +31 20 676 6096

Fax: +31 20 676 4471

Email: contest@worldpressphoto.nl

Web: http://www.worldpressphoto.nl

Date: Jan 15-19, 2007
Venue: Express training room, Independence Square
GOAL
Over the years many Commmonwealth member countries have incorporated ethnic and religious minorities into their societies. These groups are now an established part of society and have been
a key factor in enhancing cultural diversity. In some countries they
represent sizeable proportions of the populations and cannot be regarded as minorities. However, the concerns and issues of the various ethnic/religious groups have not always been handled
appropriately in the press, which in some cases has contributing to inflaming tensions
rather than reporting responsibly and even-handedly.
It is important that all groups feel a sense of inclusiveness and that their concerns are appropriately addressed, understood and respected by others. The goal of this project is to contribute to peace,
democracy, good governance and the rule of law through the promotion of responsible
journalism in dealing with cross-cultural issues.

PURPOSE
The objective of this course is to ensure that journalists in selected Commonwealth countries are equipped with the appropriate knowledge and understanding to report with sensitivity and responsibility on issues that cut across cultural,ethnic or religious divides, avoiding stereotypes, cliches and inflammatory language. It will emphasise the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of the fundamental characteristics of various religions and cultures, so as to avoid rudimentary mistakes which may cause offence or exacerbate ethnic or religious tensions.
It will demonstrate how to avoid judging any one group by the actions of a few.

OUTPUTS
Up to sixteen journalists (the majority from Trinidad and Tobago, and six or more from other Caribbean countries) provided with an enhanced understanding of multi-culturalism, the differences
and similarities between various religions and ethnic groups, and of the sensitivities and potential pitfalls in reporting in a multi-cultural environment. Stories on these issues published in participants’ parent media outlets.
ACTIVITIES & DURATION
This will be a five-day training project with one lead training consultant as well as invited speakers providing explanations and briefings to the journalists on various religious and multi-cultural
issues.

Deadline: 15/02/2007

Details: Annual awards recognising and rewarding international and investigative reporting. The main criteria for eligibility are that the investigation – either a single work or a single-subject series – involves reporting in at least two countries on a topic of world significance. To be eligible to enter, articles must have been published between 1 January and 31 December 2006.

Prize: Cash prizes

Address: ICIJ Associate Director, The Centre for Public Integrity, 910 17th Street NW, 7th Floor, Washington, DC 20006, USA

Telephone: (202) 466 1300

Mobile: (202) 413 2175

Fax: (202) 466 1101

Email: info@icij.org

Web: http://www.publicintegrity.org/icij/