The Precarity of Independent Public Interest Med...
By Courtney C. Radsch This year, the theme of UNESCO’s annual World Press Freedom Day was “Shaping a Future of Rights: Freedom of expression as a driver for all other human rights.” Yet despite the celebratory events lauding the importance of independent public interest media and the role of a... |
Year in Review: Top 5 CIMA Publications of 2022
In 2022, independent media around the world faced some of the greatest threats seen in recent years. Global crises—including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, extreme violence in Mexico, and instability in Haiti—have contributed to a more hostile environment for independent reporting, including a... |
Rebalancing the Relationship Between Big Tech an...
As the global journalism industry struggles to adapt to shrinking revenue brought on by the failure of traditional business models, Big Tech companies continue to dominate the digital advertising market. This uneven playing field has led policymakers in the US, EU, and Australia to attempt to rebala... |
The Facebook Papers: How Authoritarian Governmen...
By Gideon Sarpong Last year’s avalanche of media stories about Meta (formerly Facebook), capped by revelations from the whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former product manager for the company, has put a spotlight on Facebook and how the platform could exercise greater transparency to allow citizens... |
Bearers of Bad News: The Unchecked Spread of Dis...
Last week, elections in the Indian state of Karnataka caught the world’s attention. For many, the results could hold a clue to the fate of Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party going into next year’s national election. Yet, the draw of the story was not the electio... |
Azerbaijan’s Triple Threat to Media and Freedo...
By Turgut Gambar Azerbaijan has been routinely condemned for its alarming human rights record, endemic levels of corruption, and election fraud. Not surprisingly, according to Freedom House’s 2018 Freedom in the World report, Azerbaijan is assessed as a “not free” country. While Azerbaijan has... |
Indonesian Cyber Media Association: Collective A...
Independent news producers in Indonesia say the dominant platforms for digital content distribution, namely Facebook and Google, are taking advantage of them and undermining their viability as media businesses. While this is an increasingly common complaint from news producers, especially in the Glo... |
Facebook’s “Explore Feed” Expe...
By Marija Šajkaš Facebook’s experimentation with a feed that would sideline everything but user-generated content and paid posts is threatening to separate independent journalists and civil society representatives from their audiences in Serbia. “What is the best way to hide online content? Pl... |
Audiences worldwide are hungry for quality news ...
There is growing concern that the channels for digitally distributing news–chief among them Facebook and Google–direct traffic and resources away from smaller, independent outlets in growing media markets. Opaque and fast-changing algorithms can devastate readership overnight, and with the stagg... |
Germany’s Fight Against Fake News: Can it Work...
By Niko Efstathiou and Bebe Santa-Wood The fight against misinformation in media continues to ramp up. We are witnessing an explosion of proposed solutions and approaches in how to best filter “fake news.” Many foundations, NGOs, and tech platforms are putting money into media literacy, fact-c... |