Columbia Journalism Review

Working journalists and journalism students are more often being taught to use tools like the email-encrypting LEAP, browsing-anonymizer Tor, and the messaging service Jabber. But just as one source never has the whole story, one security measure never can guarantee safety.

The problem with tools that aren’t cheerily packaged as James Bond playthings is that they can be difficult enough to use that they interfere with the ease of communication journalists have come to depend on. Most reporters don’t do anything to protect themselves, their reporting, or their sources; the ones that do invest time and effort in privacy measures sometimes go overboard.

[Commentary] It’s hard to recall a spate of media deconsolidation like the one in recent months, as companies shed their publishing divisions. Time Warner unloaded its magazine division, Time.

Tribune spun off its newspapers, as has News Corporation, with EW Scripps, Journal Communications, and now Gannett planning to follow suit soon. The Grahams sold the Washington Post and kept their education and TV businesses. The New York Times Company has done the reverse in recent years, selling About.com and its Red Sox stake to focus on its namesake paper.

There will be no cross-subsidization for these newspapers and magazines, much less synergy.

Investors tend to want growth or at least stable, predictable profits -- they’re not much interested in declining assets with uncertain futures. Even if papers figure out a digital revenue source that staunches revenue declines, it’s hard to imagine these ever being businesses with serious growth potential.

The monopolies are now in Silicon Valley, and journalism doesn’t scale like Facebook.

The National Counterterrorism Center preempted a scoop by The Intercept, a site whose stable of reporters, led by Glenn Greenwald, has consistently been a thorn in the intelligence community’s side.

After being approached for comment on The Intercept’s in-depth report on the size and growth of the nation’s terrorism database, the NCTC released a few details on the topic to the Associated Press. The AP beat The Intercept by a matter of minutes with its more narrowly focused story, a later version of which referenced The Intercept’s reporting.

The situation sparked the latest flare-up between an increasingly adversarial national-security press and an increasingly secretive intelligence apparatus.

[Commentary] Friction between reporters and government is inherent in journalism. Yet it has reached a fever pitch in Washington, many journalists and experts say -- former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson in 2014 called the Obama Administration “the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering.”

Nearly three of four journalists who cover the federal government believe public information officers are tightening press controls. More than three quarters of local, state, and national political reporters, meanwhile, said the public is not getting the full truth because of it.

There are seven Local Journalism Centers scattered throughout the United States. Supported at launch by two-year grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the LJCs are designed to foster regional journalistic collaborations, and to allow local reporters to become authorities on subjects of national importance.

They’re also opportunities for local public stations to figure out how to build something sustainable -- both in content and in finances. After five years of trial and error and almost $16 million of investment from CPB, the projects are beginning to stand on their own. According to the executive director of one such LJC, Inside Energy, Alisa Barba, the goal is to ready the work of local stations for national -- and even international -- exposure.

[Commentary] That Amazon’s Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post has the potential to be one of the more significant events in the history of modern American journalism.

The Post went from being a newspaper in retreat to being the only legacy media company in America that can consider itself a technology property. The Post is once again hungry to be a dominant force in American journalism, and the newsroom senses that the Graham era has been sealed off behind them.

The journalism isn’t what Bezos plans to revamp, or necessarily invest significant new funds in -- the new hires notwithstanding -- at least initially. His main focus is the pipeline: reaching the maximum number of customers by putting the Post’s journalism in a package (a tablet, a mobile site) that will draw the greatest number of readers.

As it has been with Amazon, his obsession at the Post is finding a way to integrate a product into millions of people’s lives in a way they haven’t yet experienced.

[Commentary] Police departments around the country increasingly are using sophisticated technology to surveil American citizens by monitoring cellphone data, in many cases carefully hiding those activities from the public and the press.

The American Civil Liberties Union, along with The Associated Press and USA Today, have all done important work recently to shine a light in the surveillance shadows. Local news outlets, including some here in Florida, have also done valuable reporting on the use of the technology, which offers investigative benefits but also raises constitutional concerns. It’s vital that a close look at these surveillance practices continues.

Local journalists in particular have an opportunity to serve their readers by building on the work that’s been done -- work that has raised serious questions about an area of high public interest, and already has had demonstrated impact.

But it’s vital, too, to understand the government secrecy that has surrounded these techniques --and how the relationships between local police and state and federal agencies, which sometimes supply the equipment, challenge public records laws. It’s going to take a multipronged media attack to get around that secrecy and learn more about what law enforcement agencies at all levels are doing.

A federal appeals court judge has decided that a gossip site is not liable for content it invites users to submit, even if some of that content is illegal in some way, making it the latest decision that immunizes websites, including news sites, against liability for user-generated content.

The US Supreme Court has never addressed the issue, so there is no national standard for whether online sites and companies are liable for user submissions, though nominally protected under Section 230 of the federal communications decency act.

The court’s decision, which reversed a $338,000 judgment against thedirty.com, leaves in place, for now, immunity that websites enjoy when it comes to publishing third-party content -- like online comments on news sites -- as long as the website does not add any unlawful material to that content. (The same protection does not extend to letters to the editor in print publications, paper’s version of user-generated content.) Plaintiffs can sue the author of the comments, but not the operator of the website where the comments are posted unless the website materially changes a user’s content from lawful to unlawful.

If you spend any amount of time around freelance writers, you’re familiar with the litany of complaints. Most publications don’t pay well. Publications that do pay well expect freelancers to do so much reporting up-front, before they’ve accepted a piece, that it makes pitching a financially risky prospect. Enter the freelancer-founded collective journalism startup.

Deca, a new nonfiction platform created by an international collective of magazine writers, is based on the premise that freelance writers know what readers want and what makes a great story, at least better than staff editors do.

Deca, which will publish stories that are “shorter than a book but longer than an article,” joins longform-oriented startups like Atavist and Byliner in selling original content as individual Kindle Singles. Each Deca member agrees to write one story per year and to edit another. This commitment to editing each other is another way of circumventing more traditional magazine structures, in which editors edit and writers write, with few opportunities for switch-hitting.

Within Deca, each story idea must be approved by two-thirds of the collective, and before publication each piece must be green-lit by three-fourths of the collective. For each $2.99 Kindle Single they sell, Amazon keeps 30 percent and 70 percent goes to Deca. Of that 70 percent, 70 percent goes to author, 5 percent goes to the editor, and 25 percent goes back to the Deca general fund. That means writers can expect $1.46 -- roughly half of the sale price -- for each Kindle Single sold. And everything that’s in the collective kitty gets distributed equally among members at the end of 2014 -- meaning even its lowest sellers reap a bit more of the benefits.

Politico and Condé Nast are entering the J-school business. Politico recently announced the creation of a 10-day Journalism Institute for college students, while Condé Nast is in talks to set up academic programs involving its magazines, including Wired and Gourmet.

As journalism schools increasingly try to connect classrooms with newsrooms to ensure students will have the right skills in a fast-changing job market, news organizations are doing the same from the opposite end.

With journalism foundations calling for “the reform of journalism and mass communication education,” and academics questioning if journalism schools are teaching students the right skills, it’s hardly surprising that news outlets are more interested in training rookies. After all, many working reporters are also adjunct journalism school professors -- setting up an academic program is just one step further.

But 10 days’ training will probably give students only the most basic introduction to political reporting, and it’s difficult to say how effective Condé Nast’s program will be without knowing which universities and schools will be involved.