Through a special agreement with more than 800 newspapers worldwide, the Newseum displays these front pages each day on its website. The front pages are in their original, unedited form.

Roll over the cities you are interested in and double click when you see a front page that interests you to get a larger image than the thumbnail that appears to the right of the map.

This is something I just found and I think it is a great idea to keep track of what is the main story in other cities.

The Google Wonder Wheel Is Gone;

Google Squared and News Timeline disappear;

and the removal of the Google News Archive search page are a mystery.

• BBC says Iran jamming its Egypt coverage
• Eritrean officials panicked by events in Egypt
• Equatorial Guinea prohibits Egypt revolt reports

These events reveal how vulnerable news reporting is to government censorship.

We regularly design news monitoring programmes for clients and we have found that monitoring the shortwave services using BBC Monitoring has proved to be a successful strategy. However, cuts at BBC Monitoring may make this strategy less effective.

Most HF broadcasters predicted an end to their services during the next decade. I hope the situation in Egypt, and the response of other dictatorships, will make them reconsider.

In today’s Toronto Sun an article titled, How Facebook can screw you by Alan SHANOFF, the author states,

I wouldn’t be surprised to see insurance company adjusters and investigators trying to become a claimant’s “friend” to obtain inner circle access. Instead of a private investigator hiding in a van on your street or behind a bush, he might very well be tracking your movements in cyberspace.”

It’s obvious that SHANOFF would be surprised to learn that Private Investigators and Adjusters in Canada wouldn’t do this to a represented claimant.  I have written on this subject twice, and all the PI’s and Adjusters I have spoken to about this know that they may not “friend” the subject of an investigation if he or she is represented.  Simple fact checking would have corrected this.

This had some far-reaching and unintended consequences. In his opening monologue, Carson quipped:  “You know what’s disappearing from the supermarket shelves?  Toilet paper.  There’s an acute shortage of toilet paper in the United States.”  By noon the next day, practically every store in America was out of stock.  A few nights later, Johnny Carson explained there was no shortage and he apologized to his viewers. However, this did not help with the scare.  As soon as people noticed the empty shelves, they wanted this paper even more.  It took three weeks to get the shelves stocked again, ending the shortage caused by a joke in Johnny Carson’s monolog.

The difference between 1973 and today is that the run on TP didn’t begin until the next morning.  Facebook, Twitter, social and mass media of all description will make such a mass panic almost instant today.  This may also precipitate an over-reaction by government at every level, which may be more dangerous to the individual citizen or businesses than the supposed threat.  Can you imagine a “War of the Worlds” panic like the one in 1938 acted out in Toronto or Boston with the forces of government turning-out to combat the imaginary menace or panicking populace?  Now replace the Martians with Terrorists and a dirty bomb — can you imagine what either city would look like?

By the way, in November 1944 the War of the Worlds (WOW) play caused a similar panic when it was broadcast in Santiago, Chile, and in February 1949 it once again stirred up unrest when it was performed by a radio station in Quito, Ecuador.  The situation in Ecuador provoked an angry mob to surround the radio station and burn it to the ground.

Ironically, the WOW panic was greatly exaggerated (Miller 1985; Bainbridge 1987; Goode 1992).  For more than sixty years we were misled by the media (for its own gain) into believing that the panic was far more extensive and intense than it actually was and this may in itself cause government to over-react today.

Wiess also makes the point that newspapers publish

1. what their editors view as of interest to their readership
2. news when they have sufficient information for a story.

This is important for competitive intelligence, business analysis and common sense. Without this realisation people are likely to jump to incorrect conclusions based on what they read. The only way to read a newspaper is to question each story and ask why it was published – to understand the hidden agenda.

When there is insufficient information or where it is dangerous for journalists to publish a news story, then however potentially important that news story is, it won’t get published. That is why so few bad news stories highlighting lack of freedom, atrocities and so on are published on the autocracies that rule much of the world. Instead, news focuses on countries where there is a relative freedom to publish, and journalists can report on what is happening unimpeded by the authorities.

If you are interested in how bias, propaganda, and politics influence the news, then please read this article.

First, the case of Shirley Sherrod, the black U.S. Department of Agriculture official accused of racism. The evidence of her racism was a short, edited video clip offered up by a partisan web gadfly, Andrew Breitbart, who has a small empire of web sites. This guy knew such a controversial and inflammatory out-take would drive millions to his web sites. This huge burst of site traffic is money in Brietbart’s pocket.

What surprised me was that the NAACP and the Obama administration swallowed this hook, line, and sinker. They didn’t review the full video, interview people present at the event, or evaluate Breitbart’s motives for publishing the edited video.

Second, the leaked military documents that now appear on the WikiLeaks site need closer examination.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is what a judge would describe as an unreliable witness. He pleaded guilty to 25 charges of hacking in Australia; and according to the National Post, “Before he set up the website in 2006, Julian Assange spent years hacking into government and company computers, including those of the U.S. Department of Defense, as part of a group calling themselves the International Subversives.”

With Assange’s talk about “war crimes” and his background, it isn’t hard to understand that this guy has an agenda. How his agenda distorts the picture of events depends upon what documents he publishes from this large volume of previously classified material.  We will never know what he didn’t publish and this creates a very similar situation to the selectively edited video clip published by Breitbart.

Photoshop

This Photoshop disaster hasn’t gone unnoticed, but it highlights the issue of how Investigators and Researchers use such pictures and how they cite collected images.

I don’t have the technical skills to verify the authenticity of every image I collect and use in reports, but I can, and do, report the source of the image and the date it was collected. For example, in this case, several versions of this image are in the public domain. If I use the image in a report, I must state its source and the date collected, as it may later be revealed as a fake or altered image.

TinEye

I also use TinEye on such an image to see if an alternative version exists and to see where else the image might have appeared. For example, using TinEye on the cropped Toronto Star image I get a reference to the obviously Photoshopped image with the bodiless hand.

National Post editorial board: Ontario stonewalls justice, one mistrial at a time

The Versadex database administered by the Canadian Police Information Centre contains information obtained by police on any call to a private address, even if that call did not lead to an arrest, and appears to contain other informal police annotations concerning individuals. Notes on mental health status are included.

The term Versadex, refers to a  family of products from Ottawa-based Versaterm which produces public safety software.  Versaterm produces Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) software with integrated E911 emergency response, (along with advanced mobile workstations in the patrol vehicles, this puts vital information at police officers’ fingertips) and the Police Records Management System (RMS) for gathering intelligence and disseminating information on involved individuals, businesses, vehicles and locations. The Records Management System (RMS) is the core of the Versadex software suite.  When RMS is fully integrated with both PoliceCAD and the Mobile Workstation they ensure a seamless information flow.

One thing leads to another and I also found an article about a study of how quickly social sites remove pictures. Some sites take up to 30 days to really get rid of the offending images. This is an important thing to understand if your are looking for derogatory pictures.

Your (journalistic) past can haunt you online

Once the cat is out of the bag, you probably won’t be able to catch her and stuff her back inside…

That (now) embarrassing article you wrote for your college newspaper three years ago? It’s still online. And when people Google you, they find it…

Apparently a lot of student newspapers are receiving requests from former student writers to remove or “hide” (from Google) articles of which they are now ashamed…

…requests by former students who were featured in articles in the student newspaper. Campus police arrests for drunkenness, that sort of thing. They would like those articles to be removed or “hidden.”…

Here’s a related story about someone trying to get an old newspaper story erased from the search engines. Article published in The Seattle Times on Aug. 15, 2008.

Websites keep deleted photos, study shows

Cambridge researchers have shown that photos aren’t always deleted when users ask, causing a major ‘data remanence’ issue for cloud computing.

According to a study of 16 social networking, blogging and photo sharing sites…most of them failed to remove photos after users deleted them…