High-profile media figures are defecting to Substack, where readers will have to pay a subscription to read their work. Could Substack remind news consumers that paying for journalism is worth it?
Politicians have been leaking secrets to journalists as long as newspapers have existed. But it’s getting more difficult thanks to surveillance technology.
It’s dangerous for the press to take up Julian Assange’s cause, two journalism scholars write. Assange is no journalist, they say, and making him out to be one is likely to damage press freedoms.
An individual may remember and forget what he or she likes, but once a version of past events is accepted and shared by a group, as a collective construction, it is on public record.
Memories of the killing of Osama bin Laden are fading, but the legacies of al-Qaeda and the war on terror’s many ‘own goals’ haunt us in the form of multiplying threats and lost civil liberties.
Laura Poitras’s much-anticipated Citizenfour is now on general release. A documentary about the whistleblower Edward Snowden, the film provides an admirable summary of the issues raised by the beginnings…
The digital era has led to increasing challenges for western and traditional news media business models. Media outlets are facing steady declines in revenue, while the migration of advertising online has…
You might have seen this week that there’s a campaign regarding the future of the internet. Its chief proponents? NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee, journalist Glenn…
Much commentary about the news media foresees the disintegration and dissolution of the mainstream monoliths – both TV networks and mass-circulation newspapers – which dominated the public sphere in the…
The revelations that Australia intercepted the communications of the President of Indonesia, his wife, and other prominent Indonesian politicians in 2009, have caused major ructions in the Australia/Indonesia…
The following words on the subject of secrets and politics were spoken at a recent Sydney public symposium, organised by my colleague Benedetta Brevini, Beyond Wikileaks (8th October 2013). There are three…
News that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar was planning a new online journalism venture with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald was leaked last week. After failing to buy the Washington Post Company earlier this…
Bradley Manning, the whistleblower behind the biggest leak of military secrets in history, has been sentenced to 35 years imprisonment. Convicted for six offences under the Espionage Act, he will have…
Why shouldn’t you, Mr Greenwald, be charged with a crime? The question was directed at Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist who broke the story of NSA surveillance using material provided by on-the-lam…