Newsrooms and Journalism

How can journalists best make use of the US Census Bureau data? asks Poynter's Al Tompkins. Every ten years, the Census Bureau releases detailed statistics about the US population: this year, the first data to be released was on the populations of the states and the percentage change in the last ten years, which is used to apportion seats in Congress.

The bureau has provided an interactive map to help journalists and others track their state's population and seats in the House of Representatives since 1910. A video on YouTube explains the apportionment process. Data will be released throughout 2011.

>Mark Thompson, the BBC's director general, said that British broadcasters should be able to launch an opinionated channel like Fox News in the UK, the Guardian reported. As the distinction between the web and television collapse, he argued while speaking a seminar on impartiality in broadcasting, the existing rules to guarantee impartiality are becoming outdated. In his opinion it no longer makes sense then for public service broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to have a monopoly over the airwaves. 

Tweeting in court:

The Register Citizen Newsroom Café opened earlier this week: an initiative of the Journal Register Co's Torrington, Connecticut-based paper that aims to allow the public into the newsroom and to invite the community "to be part of the process of local journalism at every step."

The paper's new office is based around this "open newsroom" concept and also has a Community Media Lab, a Community Journalism School and a Local News Library, all of which are free and open to the general public, the project's blog said. The first day saw more than 100 members of the community turn up.

The US government and others will use the latest WikiLeaks release "as reason for secrecy for many years to come," believes Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the Associated Press. It may take some time for the situation to change, but governments will try to plug what leaks they can and "lock things down," she said. She was speaking at the Nieman Lab event "From Watergate to Wikileaks: Secrecy and Journalism in the New Media Age."

All governments want to keep secrets from the public, she said, sometimes for the right reasons, but sometimes not. "Governments too often stretch the national security rationale well beyond reason," she continued, and there is a lot of information that is 'classified' that has little reason to be so. She pointed out that the US government spends $9 billion a year on keeping information secret. The US is far from being alone in this practice, Carroll said: and threats against journalists for reporting on what the government wants to keep secret is "an all too familiar sad story in too many countries."