Life Spy

Rick Edmonds, poynter.org

The News­pa­per Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca has post­ed its final tally of news­pa­per adver­tis­ing sta­tis­tics for 2011, and as expect­ed, it is not a pret­ty pic­ture.

Total adver­tis­ing rev­enue was down 7.3 per­cent, a per­cent­age point…

Not looking good

futurejournalismproject:

The Mexican senate passed a bill yesterday that makes killing reporters — and any infringement on freedom of information — a federal offense. As we noted earlier, 40 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2006 with very little follow through in police investigations.

The hope is that elevating such crimes to the federal level will lead to better investigations and prosecutions. The belief being that there’s less corruption at that level.

Via Reporters Without Borders:

The federal senate’s 95 members yesterday unanimously passed an amendment to article 73 of the constitution allowing the federal courts and investigators to deal with crimes that threaten the work of journalists and freedom of information. The amendment was already approved by the lower house last November.

The amendment says: “The federal authorities will also be able to try crimes under state jurisdiction when they are linked to federal crimes or when they are crimes against journalists, persons or installations that affect, limit or impinge on the right to information or the freedoms of expression and publication.” 

Mexico is ranked 149 out of 179 countries on Reporters Without Borders annual press freedom index.

ataferner:

The Bureau of Justice Assistance and the FBI, as part of the Communities Against Terrorism program (think “See Something / Say Something”), have released a flyer outlining several potential indicators of terrorist activities within Internet Cafés. Included among the potential warning signs, are anonymization software usage, steganography, and reading too many news sources on terrorist related events. Before we get to the FBI’s list, it’s important to note that Internet Cafés are not a common thing here in the U.S. The closest one will come to that is a coffee shop, bookstore, or an airport lounge. Then again, even McDonald’s offers free Wi-Fi.

Full Article

At this rate we are all going to be under suspicion just because we are breathing

Posted by Trent Nelson, theclick.us

A new Twit­ter pol­i­cy which goes into effect today allows the social net­work “to reac­tive­ly with­hold con­tent from users in a spe­cif­ic country,” so that Twit­ter can fur­ther expand glob­al­ly and “enter coun­tries that have dif­fer­ent ideas about the con­tours of free­dom of expression.”