Newsworthiness

The protests throughout the Middle East, and most notably Egypt, have registered as the No. 1 news story over the past two weeks, according to the Project for Journalism's News Coverage Index. They accounted for 20 per cent of the newshole from January 24-30 and then a whopping 56 per cent from January 31-February 6, making it the biggest international story in a single week since PEJ began...

Tweeting will be allowed from hearings in the UK Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, it was announced Thurday last week. Supreme Court justices are "content" for journalists, members of the public and legal teams to use "live text based communications" to let the outside world know what is happening in the courtroom, according to Press Gazette. The move came in guidance published by the...

The protests rocking the Arab world this week have one thread uniting them: Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite channel whose aggressive coverage has helped propel insurgent emotions from one capital to the next, says a New York Times report. Al-Jazeera has been widely hailed for helping enable the revolt in Tunisia with its galvanizing early reports, even as Western-aligned political factions...

Viewing TV coverage of terrorist events causes deterioration of psychological resources, such as commitment and a sense of success, and to feeling threatened, which in turn can also lead to loss of resources and other negative affects. This has been found in a new study at the University of Haifa. “Mass media plays a central role in reporting on terrorism and political violence. The present study...

For the most part, women in Indonesia only ever seem to make the headlines for their role as a famous person’s relative, a victim or a criminal, a reporters’ guild says. In a study carried out between July and September last year, the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) looked for mention of female news sources in seven Indonesian-language dailies. “These are the three types of women who...

The year 2010 ushered in a number of major setbacks for the media across the globe, says the International Press Institute (IPI), from the numerous journalists murdered in Pakistan and Honduras to the oppressive media laws passed in South Africa. But what did IPI consider to be the number one press freedom event of 2010? The January 12 earthquake in Haiti claimed nearly 300,000 lives, including...

Math-loving traders are using powerful computers to speed-read news reports, editorials, company Web sites, blog posts and even Twitter messages — and then letting the machines decide what it all means for the markets. The development goes far beyond standard digital fare like most-read and e-mailed lists, says a New York Times report. In some cases, the computers are actually parsing writers’...

WikiLeaks has surpassed Spiegel as the most quoted source in opinion-leading German media in the first two weeks of December, according to Zurich-based Media Tenor International. According to Media Tenor’s ongoing continuous analysis of quotations in the 40 most important German media for more than a decade, Spiegel has held the pole position from the beginning. “With Spiegel being one of the...

PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen "government takeover of health care" as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits in the US, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats' shellacking in the November elections. Readers of PolitiFact, the St Petersburg Times' independent...

There were marked differences between countries in the coverage given to the UN’s Copenhagen summit on climate change in 2009. A new study has found that of the 12 countries studied, Brazil and India provided the most coverage, followed by Australia and the UK. Nigeria, Russia and Egypt gave the summit the least space in its newspapers. In Summoned by Science: Reporting Climate Change at