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Here are some more items about news, media, and journalism that have caught my interest recently.

TOP OF THIS LIST: BBC bamboozled by spoof site: On Dec. 3, the venerable TV news show BBC World broadcast an interview with Jude Finisterra, who claimed to be a spokesperson for Dow Chemical. The topic was the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster. (Several years ago Dow acquired Union Carbide, the company whose plant in Bhopal, India killed thousands and injured more than 100,000 in the world’s worst industrial disaster.) In the interview, Finisterra offered a $12 billion (US) settlement to the 120,000 surviving victims of the Bhopal disaster. Trouble is, Finisterra is a hoaxster – one of the notorious Yes Men. See BBC reputation hit by Bhopal interview hoax, The Guardian, Dec. 4.

How did this happen? According to the Guardian, “…A producer on BBC World had been asked to book a representative from Dow for the 20th anniversary of the disaster. He went to the Dow website, and was directed to the media relations section. Email correspondence and phone calls followed, which resulted in yesterday’s interview with Mr Finisterra from the corporation’s Paris office. It appears that part of the Dow website had been hijacked in a detailed and carefully planned operation.”

Read the rest of this list…

1. You Can Blog, but You Can’t Hide, by Eugene Volokh, New York Times op-ed, Dec. 2. Here’s a thorny issue: If bloggers can be considered journalists (at least in some cases), then should they enjoy the same protections as journalists? And exactly what kinds of protections do journalists really have, anyway? Read the column. Then see what Steve Rubel and Allan Jenkins had to say about it. Volokh also has been exploring this issue further in his own weblog, The Volokh Conspiracy.
2. Wikinews. From the team behind Wikipedia, here’s a new wiki where citizen journalists can publish independent reporting. Independent Media Center because of how wikis handle updating, commenting, community review, and linking. I especially like how they create a table of contents that organizes background, timelines, and other kinds of info related to an issue. So far, article quality can be a bit haphazard, and some pieces do little more than parrot or summarize stories from mainstream sources such as AP. Still, it’s an intriguing project. I’ll be curious to see how it develops. (Thanks to Wiremine for this link.)
3. Technorati NewsTalk: From all around the blogosphere, a continuously updated list of the most-discussed news stories and related conversations in the last 12 hours. Intriguing context on current events.
4. Atlanta Journal-Constitution blogging its way to sports success, by Hays Goodman, Newspaper & Technology, Dec. 4. AJC reporters routinely participate in the commenting for the paper’s popular sports blog. Cool! At last, a paper that understands how well new media and traditional media can work together! Excerpt: “The sports blogs became so popular that, The Journal-Constitution moved them, along with most of its sports columnists, from the free section of its Web site to the subscriber-only portion of the site.”
5. National Digital Newspaper Program: The US National Endowment for the Humanities has begun a 20-year project to create “a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet.”
6. News.com Supports Trackback and Pingback: Back on Feb. 24 I wrote, “I would love it if mainstream news sites would send TrackBack pings to sites they link to from stories, and if they would publish at the end of each story a list of TrackBack pings that story has received.” Well, looks like News.com has done it. Cool!