JOURNALISM IN THE AMERICAS

Jacob Appelbaum, a volunteer security researcher for WikiLeaks – the site behind last week’s release of 92,000 classified Afghan war documents – was detained, questioned by officials at the Newark airport about his involvement with the site, and had his documents and receipts photocopied, The Independent reports. read more »

Robert Cox, the London-born journalist who covered Argentina’s Dirty War when other newspapers wouldn’t, has been made an “Illustrious Citizen of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires,” The Guardian reports. read more »

Shirley Sherrod, an African American who was dismissed from her position at the Department of Agriculture after an edited video painted her as racist, said she would “definitely” sue blogger Andrew Breitbart over the clip, CNN reports. read more »

This week’s release by WikiLeaks of more than 91,000 classified military documents on the conflict in Afghanistan reveal that the U.S. has been paying local Afghan media outlets to run positive stories, Yahoo! News reports. read more »

Following Twitter’s example, Facebook has created a “Facebook + Media” site with resources to help journalists and web developers increase participation and traffic, the Nieman Journalism Lab reports.

Many of the practices are simply Facebook PR – i.e. “make a page and put your content on our site” – but there are other insights that journalists should note: read more »

A new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says the government is “fostering a climate of lawlessness” that has led to the deaths of nine media workers this year, including seven in just two months. read more »

WikiLeaks, which earlier this year drew headlines for releasing footage of a U.S. read more »

Christopher Coke, an alleged drug kingpin central to recent violence and unrest in Kingston, was arrested and extradited to the U.S. last week, but Jamaican media outlets were blocked from covering the arrest and were forced to rely on images taken by foreign photographers, the Jamaica Observer reports. read more »

As news moves online, journalists and media outlets find themselves suffering a mix of old-fashioned attacks on press freedom as well as modern restrictions on internet access, digital news, and hosting leaked documents. read more »

There are several new updates in the political process surrounding Ecuador’s polemic Communications Law:

The deadline for a final version of the bill has been extended to July 2nd, giving legislators 12 days to add or remove provisions, Hoy reports. read more »

Segundo Carrascal Carrasco, editor of the weekly Nor Oriente, was released by the Supreme Court of Lima, after spending more than five months in prison for defamation, Crónica Viva reports. read more »

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill remains the top U.S. news story, but media outlets continue to criticize BP and government officials for limiting their access to the spill, The New York Times reports. read more »

At a time when independent journalists continue to fear state police harassment for publishing criticism of the government, and others remain in prison for their work, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, Granma, appears to be increasingly willing to print critical ideas. read more »

The Nieman Foundation at Harvard University has selected 25 journalists from around the world to participate in its annual fellowship program. read more »

The “slow-motion” oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico continues to be a major story, but journalists are complaining that BP (the oil company leasing the troubled rig and leading cleanup efforts) and government officials are restricting their efforts to cover the crisis. read more »

America Online (AOL) started in May of 1985, gained prominence as a top dial-up internet provider in the 1990s, and by 2002 it had 35 million U.S. subscribers. read more »

The 2010 World Cup in South Africa starts June 11, and the New Ibero-American Journalism Foundation (FNPI) is offering a three-day online course to journalists on how to use a smartphone to cover the event. read more »

Teen pop idols have dominated trending topics on Twitter for months, and the algorithms that put them there are driving the future of headline-writing. Using celebrity keywords are one way to increase a story’s ranking on search engines, and as media outlets migrate to the web, they are changing their headlines accordingly, David Carr writes, for The New York Times. read more »

Nearly a month has passed since an April 20 oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, and an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil are still leaking daily. The economic and environmental effects will continue to keep the oil leakage in the news, so we’ve collected several examples of how digital media is being used to report the spill. read more »

The nonprofit whistleblower website WikiLeaks has released classified military footage of a July 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed 12 people—including a Reuters photographer and driver—and wounded two children, The New York Times reports. read more »