New monument honours slain journalists

A new monument in London pays tribute to the hundreds of journalists killed in the course of their jobs.

According to Democracy Now!, the daily TV/radio news programme, which airs on over 700 stations, mainly in the US, an estimated two war journalists have died every week over the past ten years. The latest victim is Iraqi journalist Muhieddin Abdul-Hamid. He was killed Tuesday in a drive-by shooting soon after he left his home in Mosul.

According to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the 32-foot-high glass sculpture atop the BBC broadcasting house in London was unveiled by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday, following the recent deaths of the two BBC journalists, Abdul Samad Rohani and Nasteh Dahir Faraah, in Afghanistan and Somalia. The memorial, which will shine a light into the sky every night, is dedicated not only to journalists, but also to those working with them, including translators and drivers.

Rodney Pinder, director of the International News Safety Institute, told Democracy Now!: "This kilometre-high beam of light will shine every night in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world. So it brings attention to thousands, and over the years, if not millions, of people who will see this light and will ask what it’s about. So it brings attention to an issue that has been so widely ignored or not known about for so many years. The numbers of news media professionals, journalists and their support staff who are killed trying to do their job of shining light in the dark recesses of society, not just in wars, but in peacetime, often in their own countries. This has not been known, and the numbers have been rising year after year since the millennium. So this focuses international attention on what is a grave blight in all our democratic societies."

Read the rest of the interview broadcast at
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/18/new_monument_honors_slain_journalists

OJR winds up website

After a decade, the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication has decided to cease publication of the website, Online Journalism review (OJR). In his final post at OJR, Robert Niles said that the archives will remain online, but there will be no new articles. He continued:

"One of OJR's goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I'm pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to the KDMC website and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there.

The decision to close OJR means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, SensibleTalk.com. I hope that many of you will click over and visit me there.

Finally, on behalf of OJR, I want to thank you. Thank you for your readership, tips, corrections, kind words and support. And I want to wish you success as you work to build engaging, informative and sustainable websites, to better serve your audiences.

So... in that spirit, I suppose that I will borrow a classic sign-off from the world of journalism, one that's been borrowed by another recently:

Good night, and good luck.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/200806/1515/

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