Journalism Today. 5 Mar 2025

By Matthew Leake and Gretel Kahn

Our Memorial Lecture. On Monday 10 March, Dr Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, will deliver the 2025 Reuters Memorial Lecture: “Trust issues: credibility, credulity and journalism in a time of crisis.” It will be followed by a panel discussion of senior journalists from around the world discussing the themes of the lecture. | Sign up to attend or watch online | Our interview with Dr Cobb

??? 3 Top News Stories

1. BBC under fire over pulled Gaza doc. The BBC’s two most senior figures, Director-General Tim Davie and Chair Samir Shah, have faced questions in Parliament over their handling of a documentary about children’s lives in Gaza. ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’ was pulled from the BBC’s streaming service, iPlayer, after it emerged the 13-year-old narrator, Abdullah al-Yazouri, was the son of the deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas government. The independent documentary company which produced the film had not disclosed this connection to the BBC. | Read

• What did they say? Davie told lawmakers: “There were unanswered questions from the BBC… That should have been followed up.” Shah said failings in the making of the documentary were a “dagger to the heart” of trustworthiness and impartiality.

In defence of the film. Last week, more than 1,000 journalists, actors and artists condemned the BBC’s withdrawal of the film in an open letter saying it provides an “all-too-rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinian children” and “deserves recognition, not politically motivated censorship.”?

?? From our archive. With the BBC often facing intense public and political pressure in the UK, in 2023 we published an updated piece by our former Director Rasmus Nielsen on what our research says about its role in the media ecosystem. It is by far the most widely used source of news in the UK both online and offline, and it is one of the most highly trusted sources of news. It is also more widely used as a source of news than many of its peers among other public service media. | Read

2.? An investigative wildlife reporter. An award-winning investigative wildlife reporter whose work has covered stories such as pangolin trafficking and the trade in jaguar parts has shared with us why she founded the Wildlife Investigative Reporters and Editors (WIRE), that focuses on wildlife crime and environmental exploitation. Rachael Bale feels legacy media have scaled back their focus on in-depth environmental reporting. “These stories needed to be told and nobody else was doing them,” she told our contributor Maurice Oniang’o in this new piece for our website. She explains WIRE’s audience engagement strategy, partnering with other news outlets, challenges around funding and advice for budding wildlife reporters.

• A quote: “Investigative journalism has been hit really hard and wildlife journalism has never been a priority of mainstream media outlets. People still tend to think of these as stories about just animals, but they’re not. If we at WIRE can do the heavy lifting for these stories and then go to a media partner and say we have this amazing investigation, then the risk is so much smaller for them because they haven’t diverted their own reporters to work on one story for an entire year.”

3. An app to share independent journalism. An app for independent journalism has been launched in the US to allow contributors to monetise their work and democratise who gets to be a journalist. Its co-founder, Irish war correspondent Jane Ferguson, is one of the 15 journalists whose work is shared on Noosphere. The app has a scrolling, social media style feed and is available to subscribers at $14.99/month. Journalists get paid half of this fee for each new subscriber they refer, and later the compensation model will be receive a “more equitable, traffic-based revenue share,” Ferguson told Nieman Lab’s Haana’ Tameez. | Read

• A quote: “If you look at other models like Substack, everyone’s siloed. They’re all competing for the same $6 or $8 per month. It was very clear that we needed a bundling system where journalists could still take advantage of their own hard work and effectively monetize their own communities that had come to support them.

?? Chart of the day

Trust in news in the US. Every year since 2015 we've been asking audiences in the US whether they trust most news most of the time. As the chart shows, figures have evolved differently depending on ideology. Right-leaning Americans' trust plummeted during Donald Trump's presidency and has since recovered to pre-Trump levels. Trust peaked for left-leaning respondents in 2019 and has now declined. Despite the turmoil, figures from last year looked very similar to the ones in 2015. | Read

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? Coffee break

Malaysian journalist B. Nantha Kumar has been arrested on allegations of soliciting bribes, days after he exposed an alleged migrant trafficking syndicate at the capital’s main airport. | Read

India's top court allowed a podcaster charged with obscenity to resume airing his shows on the condition they met standards of "morality and decency", relaxing its previous order that the programme should stop until further notice. | Read

Most of the news outlets in Maine, the northernmost state in the United States, have become non-profits. Nieman Reports explores this state as a case study of the industry’s potential future. | Read

The Associated Press is asking a federal judge for a second time to immediately restore its access to presidential events, arguing that the Trump White House has doubled down on retaliating against the news outlet for its refusal to follow the president’s executive order that renamed the Gulf of Mexico. | Read

Slidstvo.Info looks into the life and death of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who was captured by Russian forces in the summer of 2023. | Read

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?? One piece from our archive

Detecting audio deep fakes. VerificAudio is a tool for journalists to detect any deep fakes created with synthetic voices in Spanish. It was created by Spanish media group PRISA Media, the largest audio producer in Spanish worldwide, with more than 30 radio brands in Spain, Colombia, Chile and Mexico. In a piece we published last year, product manager Olalla Novoa how she and her colleagues created this experimental tool and what other newsrooms can learn from this process. | Read

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