Diesel Civil Trust

Freelance photographer Lance Rosenfield [1] was working on assignment for ProPublica in Texas City, Texas, last week, when a BP security guard began following him. Rosenfield was later detained by police after taking photos for two ProPublica stories. One revealed that BP’s Texas City refinery had illegally emitted 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals [2] into the air in April and May. The other reported that the Texas City refinery continues to have serious safety violations [3] five years after an explosion at the plant killed 15 workers.

2105:

Mule Design details the collaboration with ProPublica on their recent redesign—excellent stuff, from both sides it sounds like.

Two journalists win out of court settlement after police refuse to let them report protest at Greek embassy in London

armeck:

shorterexcerpts:

azspot:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials—working with BP—who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

Yesterday we heard the President declare it was him - not BP - that was in charge and that anyone who thought differently did not have the facts. So should we surmise that he is responsible for this media blockage?

A Michigan lawmaker wants to register reporters to ensure they’re credible and have “good moral character.”

State Sen. Bruce Patterson is introducing legislation that will regulate reporters much as the state regulates hairdressers, auto mechanics and plumbers. Patterson, who also practices constitutional law, says the general public is being overwhelmed by an increasing number of media outlets — traditional, online and citizen generated — and an even greater amount of misinformation.

crookedindifference:

Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to. So some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about this, and working with publishers, and peering ahead to see what the future of journalism looks like. Guess what? It’s bright.

Should we be surprised that the biggest fight over freedom of expression in years involves Google, a company that produces algorithms rather than articles?

2105:

I can see newspaper bosses being okay with that, thinking that all that traffic is only costing them money, and it’s the regular visitors that they care about. And if they could just get those visitors to pay like they do for the printed version, they’ll be laughing. But to keep going they have to not only maintain that paying audience, but grow it too. Publicly traded companies (like The Times’ owners News Corporation) need to see the value of their businesses increase, not just hold steady. So how do you grow a website’s audience? By converting those fly-by visitors to subscribers. Those fly-by visitors you no longer have [due to the wall part of paywall].