journalism
News and articles about work, policy and workers' struggles in the media and culture industries around the world, and analysis and reviews of art, culture and the media.
Greece: general strike by public service workers
Public service workers in Greece have gone on strike, for the second time in two months, to defend their pensions.
The strikes have virtually paralysed the country as workers nation-wide seek to defend their pensions and protest against a government that has broken its promises.
France: strikes in state television and radio
Strikes by workers in the state media saw many programmes cancelled.
The planned strike at France Télévisions against 'reforms' was successful. At France 3, seems to be targeted for privatisation as it is supposedly too critical of the current government 56% of all employees joined the strike, rising to 60% in regioal centres.
Citizen journalism
CNN are close to launching a new website called iReport dedicated to ‘citizen journalism’ (a media term for non-professionals who report and write the news). The citizen journalist has been a topic of heavy debate across many sections of the media, particularly in the NUJ where it is considered a threat to the standards and reputation of the industry.
This is actually a very serious accusation to level.
France: Strike vote at La Tribune
Staff at the financial paper have set management a deadline of 4pm today before they begin action.
The decision was taken at a general assembly of staff held on Tuesday. According to a spokesman for the unions involved: SNJ, SNJ-CGT/SGLCE and Infocom-CGT, workers voted in favour of strike action with 4 abstaining and 5 against. They are demanding that current parent company LMVH and Alain Weill CEO of its prospective owners respect the conditions that were agreed in December.
News comparisons - start of 2008
A while back I did a story count exploring how much the mainstream media actually writes in comparison to anarchist press and online. So, having done a Freedom revamp with more stuff levered in, and as an exercise to see how online is doing in terms of story count, I thought I'd revisit the subject...
Back in November 2006 in this blog, I did a quick analysis of our media and how it compares to the mainstream in any given fortnight (to accommodate the fact that Freedom comes out that often - look at me ma I'm making the sun orbit the earth 
- also because it's a handy ten-day cycle of workdays).
Freedom Deadlines
Attached are the submission deadlines for the first half of this year's Freedom, so if any of you budding writers need to check, it's now on here. First of the year is January 10th.
We're going A4
It looks like our first Freedom of the year is going to be one of those issues.
Okay so it looks like we're going to do this thing with making Freedom an A4 size publication, which means the inevitable confusion, tears and recriminations. It's kind of like moving house except the arguments begin with what shape the furniture should be and decorating has to be done by committee.
It's Freedom, dummy!
There's nothing definite in this, but in the PDF attached is a dummy of a proposed A4 Freedom newspaper which is going for discussion to the collective, which I'd like people to comment on.
What we're mainly looking at here is shapes and styles rather than content, so don't be put off by the downpage article on the front 
. The articles are mostly taken from issue 6820 to give a bit of realism to the whole thing, but they've been simply hacked off at the end where they're too long so this isn't a finished product or anything.
Congo: journalists attacked by police
A meeting of 100 journalists in Mbuji-Mayi was broken up by police on May 31st
The general assembly had been called by the local of the Congolese Press association (UNPC) to discuss the suspension of the co-ordinator of the local due to financial irregularities.
Telegraph journalists vote for strike action
NUJ members at the Telegraph newspaper have voted 76% in favour of strike action. Staff are unhappy with work pattern changes following a move to Victoria from Canary Wharf.
Since the move, working practices for NUJ members have included 24/7 working rotas, and 54 compulsory redundancies. The NUJ claims these changes form part of a long running growth of anger and dissatisfaction among staff at the national paper, where management have ignored or overidden complaints and grievances by the staff.
