— Stand News former editor-in-chief Chung Pui-kuen and former acting editor-in-chief Patrick Lam were arrested in December 2021. They pleaded not guilty to the charge of conspiracy to publish and reproduce seditious publications. Their trial was Hong Kong's first involving media since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Stand News was one of the city's last media outlets that openly criticized the government amid a crackdown on dissent that followed massive pro-democracy protests in 2019.
— Robert Telles, a 47-year-old former Clark County public administrator, was convicted in the September 2022 death of Jeff German, a longtime Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter in a trial that highlighted concerns around press safety. The jury found the murder was "willful, deliberate and premeditated" and it was carried out by "lying in wait." Telles wore a disguise — including a large sun hat — and hid outside the reporter's home before fatally stabbing him, prosecutors said.
— Jeff German,69, had written about allegations of wrongdoing in the Clark County Public Administrator's office, reporting that Robert Telles, 47, created a hostile work environment and carried on an inappropriate relationship with a staffer. In part because of those articles, Telles lost his bid for reelection in a Democratic primary in June 2022.
— The prosecutionused video and physical evidence to tie Telles to the suspect's disguise, a maroon vehicle at the scene and DNA from under German's fingernails.
— In contrast, the defense said Telles had been framed for the death because he was trying to make changes in his political office that upset the "Old Guard." Telles testified in his own defence during the trial and denied wrongdoing, offering up a conspiracy that a real estate company had hired an assassin to kill the reporter and then frame him. "I want to say, unequivocally, I am innocent. I didn't kill Mr. German," Telles testified.
— There have been 14 journalists killed in the US since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
— In 2022, it was sold to Cox Enterprises for $525 million. Axios plans to increase its focus on U.S. news coverage and expand its city-specific newsletters to new locations, the New York Times reported. The company will also build out its paid subscription product, Axios Pro, aimed at business professionals, the Times reported.
— Their release was orchestrated as part of a complex prisoner swap between Russia, the US and other Western nations involving 24 detainees in total. Sixteen people were released from Russian custody on Thursday, including five Germans and seven Russian citizens who were political prisoners in their own country. Moscow in return got former high-ranking FSB colonel Vadim Krasikov, as well as several individuals accused of spying or cybercrime.
— In a statement earlier, President Biden hailed the agreement as a "feat of diplomacy," in collaboration with US allies, including Germany, Poland, Norway, Turkey and Slovenia.
— She was sentenced to six years in a Russian jail on the spurious charge of "spreading false information about the Russian military."
— Alsu Kurmasheva is a Russian-born naturalized American citizen who works for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. She mostly covers cultural stories for the Tatar language service of RFE/RL. Last year, she traveled to Russia to visit her elderly mother. On her way home, she was detained at the airport and had her passport confiscated. She was later sent to prison, denied consular access, and held more or less incommunicado.
— It bears resemblance to the case of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Unlike Gershkovich, the United States government does not (yet) consider Alsu Kurmasheva to be "wrongfully detained." This designation is significant. In 2020, Congress passed the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act which empowered a special office in the White House devoted exclusively to securing the release of Americans held hostage by foreign governments. The thing is, before this White House office can take up a case the State Department must first determine that someone is indeed "wrongfully detained" under the criteria set forth in the law. Alsu's case certainly fits all the criteria, but the State Department has not yet made this determination. Thus, her case has not been referred to the Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger D. Carstens.
— Gershkovich, 32, was arrested on March 29, 2023, while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities claimed, without offering any evidence, that he was gathering secret information for the U.S. Gershkovich was the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986, at the height of the Cold War.
— local tv (62%), local newspapers (58%), abc, BBC, CBS (52%), New York Times (50%), MSNBC, Wall Street Journal (49%), CNN (48%), NPR, USA Today (47%), Washington Post (46%), Fox News (43%), yahoo news (40%), Huffpost (39%)
— Among this sample of companies, HuffPost is the least trusted news brand. The company is owned by Buzzfeed Inc. Fox News is the most polarizing brand listed, with an equal 43% share for "trust" and "don't trust"
— But see Global Geneva: How AI dumbifies journalism: Ground.news, in addition to using AI to summarize its stories, seemed to be using the same formula that offered a repetition of the same elements from various publications, with little search for variations. So, at the beginning of July 2024, I stopped putting its links and just featured the most interesting piece I found.
— A court statement said that evidence collected in the case did not meet due process, casting doubt over its 'authenticity and integrity'. Judge Baloísa Marquínez ordered the lifting all the precautionary measures made against the defendants, who have not been named. She said one of the group had died during the process. The documents allegedly revealed a clandestine network involving associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and business ties between a member of FIFA's ethics committee and men whom the United States had indicted for corruption.
— Operation Car Wash was a money laundering investigation into Petrobras, Brazil's state-run oil company.Those acquitted from the Operation Car Wash case were discharged because the income of money from illicit sources could not be demonstrated, the statement said.
— The prestigious public service award went to ProPublica for reporting that "pierced the thick wall of secrecy" around the U.S. Supreme Court to show how billionaires gave expensive gifts to justices and paid for luxury travel.
— The Post's David E. Hoffman won in editorial writing for a "compelling and well-researched" series on how authoritarian regimes repress dissent in the digital age. Its third award went to contributor Vladimir Kara-Murza, for commentaries written from a Russian prison cell.
— "The protests mostly consist of chanting, praying and singing. There have been instances of counterprotests from those in support of Israel, including at Thursday evening's demonstration. The only time I have seen conflict arise firsthand is when police officers have gotten involved by yelling out warnings and initiating arrests."
— "The NYPD came on campus to clear the encampment. In speaking to some people who were actually arrested, they said there was excessive use of force. I heard people were being just grabbed and thrown on the ground. Outside of the encampment on the public street, which hadn't been fenced in, people were being thrown away from the protests and arrested, and it wasn't really clear what they were being arrested for."
— "Folks were sprayed with pepper spray, there was pushing, shoving between police and demonstrators. And through it all, there were also pretty significant numbers of counterprotesters."
— "UCLA's campus was met with extreme violence. After counterprotesters attempted to seize the encampment in our main plaza, there were a lot of injuries. One of our reporters was also injured and classes were canceled on Wednesday."
— Mirror, Express, Manchester Evening News, Ladbible, Unilad, and publications under the Lebedev-owned Independent and Evening Standard umbrella allow unrestricted access to AI crawlers. Similarly, Politico, Axel Springer's subsidiary, permits access to AI crawlers due to a content-sharing agreement with OpenAI. In a surprising move, the Daily Beast, owned by IAC, refrains from blocking any AI bots despite the company's chairman advocating for compensation to publishers by AI companies.
Conversely, some politically conservative websites, including GB News, Newsmax, Zero Hedge, Breitbart, and Fox News, choose not to block AI crawlers, diverging from other publications under the Murdoch-owned umbrella.
— To the Baltimore Sun "came all manner of misfortune — a series of bad owners, the stunning downturn in newspaper economics and — just this week — the paper's purchase by David D Smith, who runs Sinclair Inc, a Maryland-based media company that made itself infamous a few years ago when it ordered its local journalists in dozens of markets to repeat, word for word, the same rightwing 'editorial' about fake news. The identical segments had a hostage-video vibe."
— The proportion of 18-to 24-year-olds in the U.K. who access online news directly through a news website or app is 24%, down from 52% in 2018. (The same statistic for over-35s has stayed about the same, at just over 50%.) More than three quarters of 18-to 24-year-olds who watch news-related videos find them on social media. Turning to the BBC specifically, only 36% of 18-to 24-year-olds said the corporation was "important to me" in 2023, compared with 51% of over-55s. (2023 was the first year RISJ started collecting BBC-specific data.)
— "Newsrooms that commit to AI-driven storytelling as a way to cut costs while increasing output will be lost in a sea of similarly bland content and spammy marketing."