Journalism

Editor’s notes: The list below is CPJ’s most recent and preliminary account of journalist deaths in the war. Our database will not include all of these casualties until we have completed further investigations into the circumstances surrounding them.

The AP and PBS "Frontline" found over 1,000 people from 2012 through 2021 died after police used tactics that were not supposed to be lethal.

All Cases

A team of journalists led by The Associated Press has documented 1,036 deaths over the decade from 2012–2021 after police used physical force or weapons that are meant to be safer than firearms. Browse themes uncovered by this investigation, view details from all the cases and search for cities and towns where deaths happened.

[UPDATED 11.01.2024] At least eighty Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed, several have been injured and others are missing during the war in Gaza. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) condemn the killings and continued attacks on journalists. The IFJ calls for an immediate investigation into their deaths.

The St. Croix Avis, a newspaper with a storied 180-year history serving the people of St. Croix, has announced it will soon cease operations. The news marks the end of a significant chapter in the territory's media landscape.

As Google begins the big switch-off of cookies on Chrome, ad-funded journalism on the open web is facing a fight for survival.

Samir Sassi joins growing number of journalists imprisoned and prosecuted in country

Australia-born Pilger was adversarial, feisty and uncompromising, drawing praise and respect from people across the ideological fence.

The past year has been another troubling one for the Russian free press.

It’s a sharp reversal from the last two years, when layoffs fell and some news outlets even expanded.

Several major publishers have been in talks to license content to the creator of ChatGPT, but agreement on the price and terms has been elusive.

In the end, though, the crux of this lawsuit is the same as all the others. It’s a false belief that reading something (whether by human or machine) somehow implicates copyright. This is false. If the courts (or the legislature) decide otherwise, it would upset pretty much all of the history of copyright and create some significant real world problems.

Part of the Times complaint is that OpenAI’s GPT LLM was trained in part with Common Crawl data. Common Crawl is an incredibly useful and important resource that apparently is now coming under attack. It has been building an open repository of the web for people to use, not unlike the Internet Archive, but with a focus on making it accessible to researchers and innovators. Common Crawl is a fantastic resource run by some great people (though the lawsuit here attacks them).

But, again, this is the nature of the internet. It’s why things like Google’s cache and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine are so important. These are archives of history that are incredibly important, and have historically been protected by fair use, which the Times is now threatening.

(Notably, just recently, the NY Times was able to get all of its articles excluded from Common Crawl. Otherwise I imagine that they would be a defendant in this case as well).

Either way, so much of the lawsuit is claiming that GPT learning from this data is infringement. And, as we’ve noted repeatedly, reading/processing data is not a right limited by copyright. We’ve already seen this in multiple lawsuits, but this rush of plaintiffs is hoping that maybe judges will be wowed by this newfangled “generative AI” technology into ignoring the basics of copyright law and pretending that there are now rights that simply do not exist.

Wordle. Connections. Spelling Bee. Ye olde crossword. The ‘Times’ is home to beloved brainteasers that are helping boost the paper’s bottom line. As one staffer jokes, the “‘Times’ is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news.”

The Associated Press (AP) News Guild announced Sunday it has struck a deal with management on a three-year contract after 19 months of negotiations that culminated in a final end-of-year push.

“This announcement follows rounds of intense discussions with the company over the last two weeks, culminating in even more intense discussions over the last two days. Our efforts were backed by strong member pressure through social media, petitions and emails to AP executives,” the union said in a statement.

At least 12 journalists in the United States were arrested or faced dubious charges in 2023, among them two journalists in Alabama who were charged with felonies for “publishing” and a reporter in Illinois who was cited for asking city employees “too many questions.” The criminalization of routine journalism this year shows authorities either do not understand newsgathering practices or, more alarmingly, do and use prosecutions as a cudgel to chill future reporting.

As Narendra Modi's government clamps down on the free press, top journalists are going solo to report unbiased news.

Smith worked at The Wall Street Journal for more than 20 years covering the electricity industry.

Restricting the information that chatbots can access may be the quickest way to build useful AI-powered tools for journalism.

Journalists have been targeted for harassment, and some women are only allowed to speak to the press if they have a male chaperone.

France, Italy, Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, and Sweden aim to undermine the first European law aimed at protecting freedom and independence of media in Europe. According to documents obtained by Disclose, in partnership with Investigate Europe and Follow the Money, these seven countries actively advocate for authorizing surveillance of journalists in the name of “national security”.

The tug of war is coming to an end. For over a year, a bill designed to protect media freedom in Europe, the European Media Freedom Act, has been the subject of intense debates in Brussels and Strasbourg. Within this document aimed at ensuring the independence, freedom, and pluralism of the media, one article stands at the heart of tensions between the member states and the European Parliament: Article 4, concerning the protection of journalistic sources, considered as one of the “basic conditions for press freedom” by the European Court of Human Rights. Without this protection, “the vital public-watchdog role of the press as guardian of the public sphere may be undermined.”

Disclose, in partnership with the collective of journalists Investigate Europe and the media Follow the Money, has managed to penetrate the closed-door negotiations. Our investigation unveils the details of fifteen months of negotiations that could lead to a final text on December 15, 2023, after a third round of discussions between the EU Council, the Parliament, and the European Commission. These documents (summarised at the end of this article) reveal the repressive intentions of the French government against the press, actively supported by the far-right Italian government and the authorities of Finland, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, and Sweden.

Looking back at Apple Daily, the newspaper that wasn't afraid to raise its voice against the Chinese government. The BBC published this after Apple Daily shut down in 2021.

Almost two-thirds of the $100 million Google must give to news outlets across the country each year will be distributed to print and digital media, with the remaining third being split between CBC/Radio-Canada and other private and public broadcasters.

Gessen, a queer Jew, is being punished by the German political machine for being too open about the nature of global authoritarianism.

Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has built an impressive career in US journalism by being a constant thorn in the side of the Russian state. That journalistic campaign entered a new chapter in November when the Russian government issued a warrant for their arrest

Gessen, a staff writer at the New Yorker, gave an interview in which they spoke about well-documented Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha (OHCHR, 12/7/22). The Russian government, forever clamping down on negative press of its military invasion of Ukraine, symbolically declared them an outlaw. (Gessen lives in the United States.)

In the post-2016 shock of Donald Trump’s presidential election, a great deal of US media fell into a trance of believing that Trump’s success could only be explained by Russian electoral sabotage. Gessen, refreshingly, took a different approach. Rather than blame one regime for the electoral outcome, they rightfully put Trump in the context of a global movement of authoritarian backlash toward liberalism. Their pieces linking Trump’s success to the rise of authoritarianism in Russia and Hungary remain essential reading

But when Gessen turned their lens to Israel, they fell victim to pro-Israel censorship. Their recent essay (New Yorker, 12/9/23) on Holocaust remembrance culture in Germany was a self-fulfilling prophecy: As a result of Gessen’s observation that the language that most accurately describes what is happening in Gaza—”the ghetto is being liquidated”—comes from the Jewish experience during World War II, the Green Party–affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS), which was planning to award Gessen its Hannah Arendt Prize, canceled the event.

There is a special irony in a prize in the name of German Jewish philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt, whose work on the rise of German fascism is essential, being withheld from another Jewish journalist for writing about the rise of authoritarianism.

Arendt herself, as Gessen’s essay noted, wasn’t afraid to link Zionist extremism with the “N word,” joining other Jewish intellectuals in 1948 (including Albert Einstein) who protested the visit of Israeli politician Menachem Begin to the United States, denouncing Begin’s Herut (Freedom) party as “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” (Haaretz, 12/4/14). It seems likely that Hannah Arendt would also be deemed unworthy to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize.

IANS will now operate as a subsidiary of Adani’s AMG Media Networks.

And the controversial billionaire's influence over Indian media continues to grow.

Quartz co-founder Zach Seward is being tasked with establishing principles for how the Times will and won’t use generative AI.