Remembering the ‘father figure’ of journalism in Gaza, the suffering of Wael al-Dahdouh, and which rights do AI and journalists have in common?

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Remembering the ‘father figure’ of journalism in Gaza. On the afternoon of October 7, Bilal Jadallah stood inside the offices of Press House, the media center he had founded in the Gaza Strip, as journalists came to pick up free flak jackets and helmets.

The suffering of Wael al-Dahdouh in “deadliest conflict for journalists.” Al Jazeera’s bureau chief has lost many family members in the Gaza conflict including his son Hamza, one of 76 Palestinian journalists who are reported dead. Index on Censorship speaks to a fellow journalist and family friend about the tragedy.

Which rights do AI and journalists have in common? “The real question at hand is whether artificial intelligence should have the same right that journalists and we all have: the right to read, the right to learn, the right to use information once known.”

The post-election battle for Poland’s state-run media. Putting state-run media on a sustainable independent footing – making it less like RT and more like the BBC – will be a fraught longer-term project, however the wrangling resolves.

India: damning new forensic investigation reveals repeated use of Pegasus spyware to target high-profile journalists. Forensic investigations by Amnesty International’s Security Lab confirmed that Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, and Anand Mangnale, the South Asia editor at The Organised Crime and Corruption Report Project (OCCRP), were among the journalists recently targeted with Pegasus spyware.

Content from our partner McKinsey & Company

Global trade patterns
between countries are shifting. McKinsey’s Jeongmin Seong, Olivia White, Michael Birshan, Lola Woetzel, and coauthors explore these changes in a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, which analyzes the changing geometry of global goods trade using four measures: trade intensity, geographic distance, import concentration, and a new measure of “geopolitical distance.”

Five things news media can do to respond to consistent news avoidance. “The meaning of news to citizens is deeply tied in with the communities to which they belong,” argues this excerpt of a new book on the topic.

How they did it: investigating the Pylos shipwreck. In the early hours of the morning of June 14, 2023, a small fishing trawler carrying hundreds of migrants sank off the coast of Pylos, Greece. Roughly 600 people died in what has become one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks in recent years.

2023 prison census: jailed journalist numbers near record high, Israel imprisonments spike. Israel emerged as one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists following the October 7 start of the Israel-Gaza war, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2023 prison census has found. Israel ranked sixth – tied with Iran – behind China, Myanmar, Belarus, Russia, and Vietnam, respectively.

Dan Neidle: from tax lawyer to journalism superhero. Neidle says mainstream journalists were integral to his award-winning Nadhim Zahawi investigation.

‘It is still dangerous to be a journalist’: Daphne Caruana Galizia’s son reflects on her life and legacy. Paul Caruana Galizia’s new book grapples with the seismic impact of his mother’s murder, and how her fearless reporting may have saved Malta from becoming a “mafia state.”

Center for Cooperative Media’s top 10 journalism collaborations of 2023. This was a year that included several big international investigations, regional partnerships, and multilingual collaborations.

Photo credit: Bilal Jadallah by Ali Jadallah