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1 June 2012 | Data Driven Journalism

And the winners of the Data Journalism Awards are…

In January this year the Global Editors Network in collaboration with the European Journalism Centre launched the first edition of the Data Journalism Awards (DJA). With over 300 applications from 60 countries received in less than three months and an outstanding group of experts sitting on the jury led by ProPublica's founder Paul Steiger, the competition has been dubbed the “Pulitzer prize of data journalism." The six winners of the 2012 edition of the Data Journalism Awards were announced during a ceremony hosted on Thursday at the News WorldSummit in Paris. Each winner is being rewarded with EUR 7.500 and a certificate created by the Le Monde cartoonist Plantu. The complete list of entries and their details will be made freely available in a database in autumn 2012 on the occasion of the launch of the second edition of the Data Journalism Awards. Please visit the Data Journalism Awards website for the full list of winners and shortlisted projects.

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1 June 2012 | Euractiv

EU Parliament votes bring ACTA closer to final rejection

Three committees in the European Parliament have rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on Thursday, in what some MEPs described as the last nail in the coffin for the controversial agreement. The Civil Liberties, Industry and the Legal Affairs committees in the European Parliament all rejected ACTA in separate opinions adopted Thursday. The Trade Committee, which has the lead on the dossier, is scheduled to give its opinion on ACTA on 21 June, paving the way for a vote in plenary before the summer recess, where a growing number of MEPs appear ready to kill the agreement. In its opinion, the Civil Liberties Committee said ACTA failed to respect the EU's fundamental rights while the Industry Committee said it fails to balance intellectual property rights, business freedom, protection of personal data and the freedom to receive or provide information. The separate motions were passed by 36 votes to one (with 21 abstentions) in the Civil Liberties Committee, by 31 votes to 25 in the Industry Committee and by a slim margin of 12 votes to 10 (with two abstentions) in the Legal Affairs Committee. The votes marked a polarisation in Parliament on ACTA, with the Socialists and Democrats, the Greens and the Liberals teaming against the agreement against the centre-right European Peoples Party (EPP), which acted as a supporter of the agreement.

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1 June 2012 | PC Mag

Internet traffic to reach 1.3 zettabytes by 2016

If you're not sure what a zettabyte is, then listen up. It's equal to a million terabytes, a trillion gigabytes, or a whopping 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes. And here's why it's important. By 2016, global Internet traffic is expected to reach a staggering 1.3 zettabytes annually, according to a new report from Cisco. To put that into perspective, it's the equivalent of 38 million DVDs per hour. The network equipment maker predicts that monthly Internet traffic in 2016 will be four times the level seen in 2011. Cisco says that several main factors will contribute to the staggering growth in Internet traffic: an increasing number of devices, more Internet users, faster broadband speeds, and more video. By 2016, there are expected to be some 3.4 billion Internet users, or about 45 percent of the world's projected population. And the proliferation of tablets and smartphones will drive up the number of network connections to nearly 19 billion, or the equivalent of 2.5 connections for each person on earth. All those Internet users, with all their Internet-connected devices, are also going to need faster broadband, and want to watch more online video. The average broadband speed is expected to increase fourfold, from 9 megabits per second (Mbps) in 2011 to 34 Mbps in 2016, Cisco predicted. And, 1.2 million minutes of video, or the equivalent of more than two years worth, will be consumed every second. Users are also going to rely on Wi-Fi more in the future. By 2016, over half the world's Internet traffic is expected to come from Wi-Fi connections.

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1 June 2012 | AP

Google adds feature to help users in China avoid disruption from Internet filters

Google has fired a new salvo in a censorship battle with Beijing by adding a feature that suggests alternatives for search terms that might result in blocked results. Google’s announcement Thursday did not mention Beijing’s extensive Internet controls. But it comes after filters were tightened so severely in recent weeks that searches fail for some restaurants, universities or tourist information. Authorities were aiming to stamp out talk about an embarrassing scandal over the fall of a rising Communist Party star. Google Inc. closed its China-based search engine in 2010 to avoid cooperating with government censorship. Mainland users can see its Chinese-language site in Hong Kong but the connection breaks if they search for sensitive terms. The new feature will alert users in China if they type in a search term that “may temporarily break your connection to Google” and suggest alternative terms, Google said in a blog post signed by a senior vice president, Alan Eustace. Google cited as an example the Chinese character “jiang,” or river, without mentioning that it also is the name of former President Jiang Zemin, the possible reason the government blocks search results. It says the site will recommend users in China write their search terms without that character.

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1 June 2012 | The Daily Beast

US: Men rule media coverage of women’s news

In media coverage of women’s issues such as abortion, birth control, and Planned Parenthood, men are doing most of the talking, a new study has found. Men are quoted around five times more than women in these stories, according to the research group The 4th Estate, which has been studying election coverage for the past six months. Among 35 major national print publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, men had 81 percent of the quotes in stories about abortion, the research group said Thursday, while women had 12 percent, and organizations had 7 percent. In stories about birth control, men scored 75 percent of the quotes, with women getting 19 percent and organizations getting 6 percent. Stories about Planned Parenthood had a similar ratio, with men getting 67 percent, women getting 26 percent, and organizations getting 7 percent. Women fared a bit better in stories about women’s rights, getting 31 percent of the quotes compared with 52 percent for men and 17 percent for organizations. Men didn’t just dominate stories on women’s issues, the study found, but stories on all election topics, including the economy and foreign policy. Men ruled the airwaves as well. In the report, called Silenced: Gender Gap in the 2012 ElectionCoverage, researchers studied a total of 2,750 print articles and TV segments in the six-month period from Nov. 1 to May 15, according to The 4th Estate. Separately, a recent study called The OpEd Project found that men are writing the majority of opinion columns in the media.

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1 June 2012 | Reuters

Italian journalist defends Vatican leaks

An Italian journalist behind a leaks scandal shaking the Roman Catholic Church denies Vatican accusations he is a criminal and says he was only doing his duty to uncover the truth. Gianluigi Nuzzi's book, alleging corruption and conspiracies among cardinals in a Vatican struggle for power, has led to a hunt for informants in the Holy See and the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI's butler, one of the people closest to him. "My job is to find and publish news, it is my ethical duty. These documents reveal the secrets of the Vatican but there is nothing in the documents that threatens the security of that state," Gianluigi Nuzzi told Reuters on Wednesday. He spoke as the pope denounced what he called false media coverage of the scandal, which his aides have branded a brutal, personal attack on the ageing pontiff. Nuzzi's book "His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI" contains a trove of private Vatican correspondence, including documents alleging cronyism and corruption in infrastructure contracts with Italian companies, conspiracies among cardinals and clashes over management at the Vatican's own bank, the IOR. Nuzzi said the book, which hit the stands last week and is selling out in Rome, is based on conversations with more than 10 Vatican whistleblowers, who have been referred to in the Italian press as "crows", a pejorative term for informants.

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