A protest group called the Ladies in White (Las Damas de Blanco) marched through the Cuban capital, Havana today (October 14) calling for the release of dissidents jailed by the Castro regime.

The group is made up of female relatives of 75 Cuban political prisoners seized in March 2003.

Those arrested included human rights activists, journalists, and librarians. They were given jail sentences of up to 28 years.

Never heard of them
The Ladies in White go to Mass each Sunday wearing white dresses and then walk silently through the streets carrying flowers and pictures of their loved ones.

They don’t get that much coverage over here.

Can’t think why…

An American study has revealed an unlikely saviour for the newspaper industry: kidnappers seeking to prove the day’s date in filmed ransom demands.

The University of Lincoln is launching a digital archive of the work of journalist John Pilger, reports journalism.co.uk.

(Thanks to LSJ graduate Hayley Cook for the RT)

The Guardian has overturned an  injunction banning reporting a question tabled by an MP in Parliament.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said on Twitter: “Victory! Carter Ruck caves-in. No Guardian court hearing. Media can now report Paul Farrelly’s PQ about Trafigura.

From Press Gazette via Twitter.

Is Facebook getting into the news business? Well, yes it might be, according to this post from digital marketing firm Econsultancy.

The author pushes the (surely correct?) argument if the people won’t come to the news, the news has to go the people. And a lot of the people are on Facebook.

No pay…no play?
But, as the post also points out, Facebook has just gone into profit.

No mean feat on the web – but it’s still operating in an environment where people expect everything to be free at the point of use.

So is there enough money in news?

Free (well, cheap) press
There is one theme running through many of these speculative posts on the future of new news outlets: the assumption that there are lots of out-of-work journos out there to staff them on the cheap; and the assumption that there’ll be some kind of relationship between community reporters on the ground (for want of a better description), and the pro journalists filtering their stories.

The Guardian seems to have something along these lines in mind; and there’s this scheme up and running at the Northern Echo.

Interestingly, it seems very nebulous except in the case of the Echo …

The UK’s highly restrictive legal system is trying to wrap its gag around Parliament.

The Guardian is to challenge a ban by lawyers Carter-Ruck on reporting a question submitted by an MP.

Mind your own business
The newspaper isn’t allowed to identify the MP who has asked the question, say what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

From Paul Stainthorp via Twitter.

The Guardian web site is hiring for a planned local news project to be launched next year in Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh.

The company is looking for bloggers to cover community news with an emphasis on “local political decision-making”.

The line is engaged
Digital development director Emily Bell said they were focusing on “three politically engaged cities”. (??)

Send the bill to…
OK, there’s no mention that the Guardian won’t be footing its own bills here.

However, the article does cite a $3m handout to US public broadcaster NPR “for a hyper-local news project to compensate for the decline in local press”.

This will pay for “a pool of bloggers [that] will provide news topics of interest to local US communities” (though not of such great interest that they’ll pay for the news themselves, apparently).

US Today…UK tomorrow
Apparently, a similar plan is under discussion in the UK that could “give a subsidy to the Press Association to cover local courts and councils”.

I don’t get it.

When did we all become convinced that state-funded local media will provide independent local news?

I listened to a piece on BBC radio yesterday (October 10) which revealed the corporation’s problems with the notion of impartiality.

Czech mate
It was about the Czech Republic’s ratification of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty. The BBC interviewed an insider on Czech politics who said any delay was the result of grandstanding and political machinations by President Klaus.

This, of course, may well be true. I know nothing of Czech politics, but the idea that a politician might grandstand and machinate does not shock me.

Czech out
I waited for the interview to continue with someone from the other side who would no doubt refute these accusations and hurl some of his/her own.
But there was no such interview. The piece closed. That was that.
The message was clear: treaty ratifiers = good; anti-ratifiers = not worth the bother really.

EU EU oh
This is fairly typical of the way the BBC does Europe. There’s an implicit assumption that the the European Union is a Good Thing, and that an ever-closer European Union is a Good Thing as well.
Yet a good proportion of licence-fee payers (in fact, I’d say a clear majority) doesn’t see things this way at all.
Given this, surely a little more Euro-rigour – perhaps even Euro-scepticism – is appropriate?

Wikileaks aims to make life easier for leakers by letting media and human rights campaigners embed an upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks form onto their web sites, says this report from Computer world.

According to the report, Julien Assange, an advisory board member at Wikileaks, said at a security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia that: “We will take the burden of protecting the source and the legal risks associated with publishing the document.”

From The Nieman Journalism Lab via Twitter