The freeing of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito by an Italian court this week revealed some awful gaffes by the media trying to rush to judgement. Numerous outlets, on hearing the word guilty (relating to slander) assumed it was guilty of all charges and pressed “publish” on pre-prepared stories. The most egregious of these was The Daily Mail which included …

The UK media clan are busy picking apart the issues around so-called “Super-injunctions” and privacy – particularly the lack of a UK Privacy law. Much of this has centred on the revelation by my former colleague Andrew Marr that he had taken out an injunction some years ago to prevent news of an affair being published. This was initially greeted …

By far the best book on journalism I read was “The Elements of Journalism” by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in the US – part of the Pew Center. When I ran BBC News I bought a copy for every editor (and one or two of them may even have read it). Now …

The Daily – Rupert Murdoch’s new daily newspaper for the Apple iPad – launched in the US this week – not yet available in Europe. This YouTube demo gives a good flavour of it. The first two weeks are free – then it’s 99c a day. It’s recieved mixed reviews – a round-up here from Slate. From The Week here. …

There’s been much discussion and speculation about the visit of China’s leader, President Hu Jintao to Washington this week. Just what was discussed in his talks with Barack Obama in the White House? I think I may be able to offer an exclusive insight. Fifteen months ago I had my own personal meeting with President Hu in Beijing. Here’s how …

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford is publishing a study I’ve written on the future of International News. Downloads or purchasable here. Here’s the introduction: Foreign news is undergoing a transformation. For more than a hundred years the principal means of learning about events in the rest of the world has been through the reporting of …

Alan Mutter – a former newspaper executive,Silicon Valley CEO and academic at Berkeley Journalism School has renewed the call for american journalism to abandon any pretence at objectivity. “It’s time to retire the difficult-to-achieve and impossible-to-defend conceit that journalists are now, or ever were, objective. Let’s replace this threadbare notion with a realistic and credible standard of transparency that requires …

TV is set for major changes in the UK in 2011. First, Ofcom, the regulator, off the back of a new EU policy, is to allow Product Placement for the first time in commercial programmes and will relax the code on programme sponsorship. This is to further support production at a time when the value of advertising spots is in …

The Media Standards Trust has a new study published into the delcine of international reporting in the British Press. “Shrinking World” estimates that in parts of the British press, foreign coverage has fallen by almost 40 per cent since 1979, now making up only just over a tenth of stories in the paper. It concludes: “Many of the changes in …

An interesting week to visit the US with some historic mid-term elections producing the biggest vote against a sitting President for more than 70 years. There’s been plenty of analysis of the results so I won’t indulge myself.   (Except to note, as my colleague Marshall Manson has pointed out,  Bill Clinton managed to deliver results in the face of a hostile Congress …