Recently this map, which shows how the picture of the US gets distorted if states are sized according to how much news they generate, attracted my attention.

Originally credited to Science News magazine, it appeared in the blog Strange Maps and then was picked up in Adrian Monck’s journalism blog. It is based on an analysis of 72,000 wire-service news stories from 1994 to 1998 and shows how reporting on the government out of Washington, DC and on events in the northeast of the country dominate the news agenda.

I thought it would be interesting to share how the Reuters News map of the world looks. With 190 bureaus around the world we are hugely global, but the bulk of the news by volume that we put out is indeed about the G8 countries and the key emerging markets.

There are stories everywhere, but the news agenda is always a balance between the push of what journalists think is important and the pull of what you, the readers, want to know about.

Important stories from under-reported countries sometimes take a very long time to get the attention of journalists and then of the public.

It is our job as journalists and editors to make sure that we’re there to cover the news, wherever it may happen. Beyond that, we have a responsibility to ensure stories that deserve attention actually get it.

We do that with good writing; we do that with the quality of our sources; we do that by making the connections that show why something is important.

Let’s work together to make sure the long tail of news really works to illuminate all parts of our world.

There is no question that news is emotional.   

News is about real people, real issues, real money and real lives.

News is about history, and about how history - and different views of history - impact the present.

Readers of news services, including those of Reuters News, have strong views and often emotional views about how we cover stories that either directly affect their lives or their emotions.Every year brings to the headlines stories that have the power to stir bitter feelings.

Our job as journalists is to keep the emotion out of it, to strive for objectivity, to strive to be free from bias, to strive to tell the story as it is.

This year one important story that has polarized readers has been Tibet and the violence there involving Tibetans, ethnic Chinese and the Chinese authorities.

Our job as journalists is not to take sides. Our job is not to say who is right and who is wrong. Our job is to report as quickly, clearly and accurately as possible so that readers can make up their own minds and to let the facts - and the protagonists - speak for themselves.

This is particularly difficult in a story like Tibet were we have been restricted from reporting as freely as we believe is necessary. Our reporting has had to rely on sources, eyewitnesses, official accounts and documentary evidence.

Where we cannot count bodies ourselves, we must report on conflicting accounts of casualties. Where we cannot observe events ourselves, we must evaluate and triangulate eyewitness reports.

Our China bureau is staffed with men and women with expertise in the region who, like all the journalists in Reuters News, subscribe to the Trust Principles that bind all of Thomson Reuters and that ensure we report the news independently, accurately and free from bias.

  REUTERS photo by Stefan Wermuth  

This is Day One of the new Reuters News, a news organization that is part of Thomson Reuters, the company formed when two great leaders of news and information came together.

As Editor-in-Chief, I want to assure you that the Reuters News you will see will maintain its commitment to independent, trustworthy, useful news; news that is free from bias and filled with the insight you need.

That’s the excellence that saw us recently win, among other awards, a Pulitzer Prize for spot photography and a Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for commentary.

Over the next weeks and months, we will combine the best from the old Reuters news and from Thomson Financial news; we’ll be bringing together people and services. Most of the difference will be seen immediately on our desktop products for financial professionals, but over time I’m sure you’ll see new bylines and data on our Reuters Media consumer-facing sites as well.

My commitment is for Reuters News to be the global, insightful and innovative powerhouse you want to serve your news needs in words, pictures and video. There are more than two and a half thousand professional journalists around the world backing up my words with their actions every minute of every day of the year.

David Schlesinger is Editor-in-Chief, Reuters News, Thomson Reuters

(Note: Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger sent this note to all Reuters journalists today after cameraman Fadel Shana was killed along with two civilians in the Gaza Strip. Full story here)

I’m very sorry to report that 23-year-old Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana was killed on Wednesday in what appeared to be an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip.

Our hearts obviously go out to his family, as we mourn another loss in our journalistic family. Our thoughts are with his colleagues in Israel and in Gaza who must go on reporting even when surrounded by tragedy.

I’ve called for an immediate and complete investigation into the incident. We know, of course, that journalism is a dangerous business. We know, of course, that we rush into danger when others rush away. We know, of course, that accidents happen.

But I also believe sincerely and absolutely that all of us — news organizations, governments and the military — have an obligation to make reporting safer and to take the utmost care when professional journalists are doing their jobs.

It is, of course, striking that this tragedy occurred on the last day for Reuters as it has been and the day before Thomson Reuters begins as a news and information power in the world. I can but reflect on our more than a century and a half of bravery and sacrifice in the service of the news, and to vow that Reuters news in the new company will forge a new tradition, building on the old, that we can all be incredibly proud of.

Blogging is big in Iran. We already knew that from Technorati statistics on the prevalence of Farsi language blogs on the Web. But now comes a fascinating insight into what all those bloggers are blogging about.

This is what the Iranian blogosphere looks like, according to John Kelly - a Columbia University academic who isn’t joking when he tells audiences he thinks there isn’t a human phenomenon that can’t be reduced to a series of coloured dots.

Each dot represents a blog , and the bigger the dot the greater the number of links being made to that blog.

I’m surprised by the size of the conservative politics blogosphere and of the neighbouring religious blogosphere, which are jointly around the same size as the secular and reformist blogospheres.

Most surprising, however, is the equally large poetry blogosphere in the upper left hand quadrant.

John previewed this recently published research at the Media:Republic gathering in Los Angeles last month. And it was the size of the poetry blogosphere that got participants talking — I think most of the American and British participants felt slightly awed that Iranians were using the Web to create art on such a scale.

Some suggested that poetry had a long track record of morphing into radical politics. Someone else said they knew of U.S. groups looking at funding Iranian poetry bloggers as agents of change. At the time this sounded a bit fanciful to me. But thinking about it, history is littered with poets getting their hands dirty in politics, and John Kelly’s image makes the proximity of poetry and political reform blogospheres extremely clear.

I was invited to a gathering of activists, academics and media practitioners by the Berkman Centre’s Media:Republic program in LA last weekend. Exhilarating to be in such exalted company but depressing to find them so anxious about the future of political engagement and so negative about big Media’s future.

The context of the meeting was to establish what we don’t understand about the emerging media landscape in order to inform the direction of future research programmes.

So, in the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld, what do we know that we don’t know?

How distributed can the production of meaning be?
An academic question from John Zittrain of Berkman but very much with real world concerns in mind. He’s worried about where the atomisation of media consumption and production will take society. In an elitist world, one in which communication channels (including media) are controlled by the few, then it is relatively easy to see how the politics of consensus and compromise can be pursued. But many felt that the new social technologies were creating new silos, reducing the quality of public discourse, accelerating disengagement from politics and, possibly, creatng the conditions for extremist politics.

How can we get the public to eat their broccoli?
Traditionally, nearly all media has followed a public service remit to some degree and mixed content with public policy relevance with the really popular stuff. So you get a smattering of Darfur in a diet of domestic news, celebrity and sports. But that only works when publishers control the medium.

I know I wasn’t the only one to squirm as David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, described how increasingly anachronistic the Big Media model of editors deciding what it was appropriate for readers to read was beginning to seem. What seemed to worry this group more than anything else was that if consumers control their ‘DailyMe’ — a personalised news service — then how will the public service stuff get through?

Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation gave some great context when he said, “More and more people are sharing experiences. That means there are fewer shared experiences. Journalism has prospered for centuries because it created shared experiences that I will call community.” He thought that journalists would prosper if they used new social technology to rebuild shared experiences.

What is the future for journalists?

The most interesting exchange I heard came in a session on the nature of journalism in 2013, in which Global Voices’ Solana Larson suggested that the BBC’s model of parachuting in white men to cover the rest of the world was looking increasingly anachronistic . She predicted that by 2013 that there would be no foreign correspondents in the sense of outsiders coming to make sense of a foreign country.

Richard Sambrook, Global Head of BBC News , rather disarmingly agreed, saying the future would be all about ‘authenticity’ — a notion that seemed to underpin much of the event’s discussions but not a word that I ever heard repeated.

At the same time there was a feeling that citizen media hadn’t really delivered on its promise of a couple of years ago. Ethan Zuckerman , a Berkman fellow and co-founder of Global Voices, who probably knows more about this than anyone else, summarized the situation as one in which bloggers took their cue from mainstream media and added that this was a global phenomenom not just true of the States.

Despite pessimism about Big Media’s future and the pefrormance of Citizen Media, a straw poll of those present showed near unanimity in the view that the future was bright for journalism. So how do you square this circle? There wasn’t a huge amount of discussion but the notion of ‘networked journalism’ with professionals working closely with amateurs and experts was one that was mentioned. And when someone said that the most interesting presentations of the meeting — BBC, Global Voices and ProPublica — were all from non-profit organisations, there was much sage nodding.

Is there a conflict between personalised online experiences and privacy?

Manuel Castells of the University of Southern California gave a much discussed speech in which he questioned whether our freedom was being commoditised in the sense that by giving service providers details of ourselves we get more personalised and therefore more useful services but we give up a certain amount of privacy.

Obviously, Facebook has brought these concerns to the fore. But there are myriad ways in which personal data is being captured and used (and sold). How long would it be before just using the phone would mean being subjected to a personalised 30 second advert, asked one speaker? (It’s already happening with one UK mobile phone carrier apparently.)

Public sector bias?

At times the lofty academic analysis left me feeling bamboozled but I found comfort in social media in the form of other participants’ Twitter and chatroom messages as they swapped virtual notes on what they liked and what confused them.

And now, several days later and after reviewing some of the more thoughtful blogs compiled by Media:Republic, I’m struck by the analysis of two fellow London-based attendees who both detected a defeatist attitude amongst the U.S. participants about the ability for commercial media to compete in this new world.

Neil McIntosh of the Guardian looked at the Los Angeles Times and wondered whether its failure to use the kind of presentational tricks used by European media to make news more palatable might be one explanation for its problems. Charlie Beckett of the thinktank Polis thinks an era of super-competition requires a smarter approach from mainstream media and advocates ‘networked journalism’ — the blending of professionals and amateurs/experts — to herald a more participatory form of journalism.

I like my compatriots’ optimism. I still worry that what I think is ‘good’ will turn out to be uneconomic in this new world.

The most memorable line from last week’s WeMedia conference in Miami came from Reverend Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus who works with ‘digital natives’ — young people who have grown up with wikipedia and YouTube and whose changing media consumption was at the root of all that was discussed.

WeMedia is the kind of event where bloggers, academics, social activists, technologists and the occasional VC poke mild fun at the slow-moving ’suits’ from old media, and where the ’suits’ complain that the newcomers don’t understand the realities of the media business while desperately working out whether they’re missing any tricks.

Two years ago in London the vibe was all about how mainstream media needed to get up to speed with blogging. And last year, despite the best efforts of the organisers, the meeting was peppered with bloggers versus journalists spats. But this year it did seem that, finally, both sides had decided it was time to establish how best to work together.

The substance of many of the exchanges was that media companies let their hierarchy and brand consciousness stop them from being bold enough to use social media effectively while activist groups can’t quite believe their luck that all these free tools have suddenly been given to them; tools which make it much easier for them to get things done without needing Big Media’s help.

There was much talk of Ushahidi.com — the remarkable Kenyan site collating post-election conflict and peace-making reports and creating a google maps mashup. And The Hub — the social media site run by human rights group Witness which brings together filmed reports of human rights abuses around the world — offered a model of how YouTube-style content and facebook-style groups might be harnessed for a specific purpose.

Michael Smolens, CEO of Dotsub, demonstrated how his group is attracting volunteers to caption films and videos in multiple languages. Hitherto, he says, Hollywood has assumed that the costs of local language production would be prohibitive and has largely limited itself to English. But now technology offers the potential to extend all video to all languages. The best example to date is of an Indian NGO subtitling training material to help unemployed women to become ‘mothers’ for orphans.

But there was at least one Big Media firm with a good story to tell and one which seemed to draw together all the threads of the conference. Jennifer Carroll, VP of New Media Content at Gannet summed up the challenge facing groups like hers as, “how do you get to the heart and soul of a community?” and highlighted the group’s user-generated site indymoms.com as one possible answer. This is a site in which user-generated content, community activism and commercial advertising all meet head on under the auspices of a major media group.

The last time I flew into Baghdad airport was in January 1991. It was just before the cruise missile attacks on the city at the start of the operation to retake Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s occupying forces. I came by commercial flight again this week, but to a different Iraq. It’s an Iraq where Saddam-era tyranny has been decentralised, messianic U.S. policy experimentation has fallen flat on its face and violence, crime and hardship are the bedrock of ordinary existence.

How you arrive affects your opinion of a city. In 1991 I was picked up by my driver, Haji Qata, whose job was to steer me away from stories and inform on me to Saddam’s secret police when necessary. He drove me to the relative comfort of the Al Rasheed hotel, a prime vantage point when the bombing began. When I arrived in April 2003 it was in the back of a U.S. Marine armoured personnel carrier that had been both home and transport during three weeks of mobile warfare along the road from Kuwait to Baghdad.

This time I needed an armed escort that travelled at speed into the city, along a highway lined with concrete blast walls and sniper screens, bouncing over the ruts left by roadside attacks launched from rival sectarian suburbs. Baghdad is not less militarised than in 2003 when the invasion force swept through the city, blowing up armaments dumped in city parks. Iraqi police, local security guards, militia forces and U.S. military swarm the streets. Helicopters thud across the skies. The effect is unnerving rather than reassuring. The security blanket has stifled street warfare in recent months, I’m told, but the threat of kidnap, criminal or sectarian, remains vivid.

In 1991 large sections of Baghdad, a city of seven million people, were off-limits to foreigners; secret districts were reserved for Saddam and his Baathist elite working in ministries and palaces behind high walls and screens of palm trees. Now the foreigners have the privileges. We drove through elaborate systems of roadblocks into the Green Zone, the vast section of the city walled off to ordinary Iraqis and reserved for politicians, civil servants and the legions of expatriates who sustain the foreign military endeavour here. The U.S. embassy is housed in a former Republican Guard palace built in chintzy opulence, all mirrored tiles, gilt door panels and marble. Military hospitals, private security armies, helicopter airports and large Saddamite monuments are enclosed within the walls of this Forbidden City. Five years of bruising reversals have sucked some of the fantastical arrogance out of the occupiers of this Oz, so memorably described by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” But on a first view the scale of the enclosure shocked me.

I came to Baghdad to visit the Reuters bureau, across the Tigris River from the Green Zone. Our reporting operation is big and complex. To deliver the story we feed, house and keep safe a half-dozen international staff and dozens of Iraqi reporters, cameramen and photographers. We occupy half a street of housing. To function efficiently we live “off the grid,” generating our own power, cooking our own food and pumping water from our own well. We have protection that would be the envy of most military bases. Walls of concrete slabs line the streets to protect the houses from mortar blasts or predatory human attack. Windows are sandbagged. Guards sit in watchtowers. Vast steel gates and bomb search bays block each end of our street.

Why are we still making such an effort to be here, now that it is quieter than in the bloody years of 2006 and 2007? Firstly because the quiet is fragile, with combatants still to be fully convinced politics will achieve more than violence. But more importantly we are here because this is the 21st century’s inaugural war. It’s a conflict that will redefine the Middle East’s sectarian and religious context, sharpening divisions, distracting Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and laying treacle in the path of social and political progress. This war will shape American policy for years by tempering the appetite for ambitious, ideologically-driven foreign adventures. It has imposed a huge cost on America’s image of itself and been a ruinous expense for Washington. In our globalised world the fiscal extravagance has had a ripple effect, touching distant economies and imposing a price on those who had no say in the war’s waging. The law of unintended consequences has applied in spades to a conflict that President Bush said would bring democracy and peace. Governments fell, militants were inflamed, terrorism raged and thousands of avoidable deaths have been suffered.

Reuters has also paid a heavy price in terms of lives. Seven of our colleagues have died in Iraq, six of them as the result of U.S. fire. Our staff have been beaten, abused and detained without trial for months. Working as a journalist in Iraq is still obscenely dangerous. The burden falls mostly on our Iraqi staff, who venture out to report and film. During my time here, in what was described as an “ordinary” week, one of our Iraqi cameramen was detained by police at a checkpoint and another left his house in a provincial town because a death threat was pinned to his front gate. Many of our Iraqi colleagues have sent their families abroad to safety and have abandoned their homes because they were in religiously fraught areas or the commute took them through hostile terrain. I have written elsewhere about the gloom I have felt over our losses. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has rightly called the Iraq war the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history. They believe 126 journalists and 50 media support workers have been killed since the conflict began on March 20, 2003. There are many reasons for this. Looming large among them is that the journalistic neutrality assumed in other wars is no longer accorded to reporters by combatants in this conflict. We are seen as partisan, as propagandists and as participants.

There is a good team spirit in the Reuters office, despite these difficulties. The city, while tense, is not as grim as before. Outside in the spring sunshine, children are playing in a riverside park and restaurants are preparing meals of barbecued mazgouf, a carp-like fish that is a Baghdad speciality. The government has constructed a zone for carefree relaxation by blocking off roads leading to the riverfront and filtering traffic through strict searches. It has a Potemkin quality but is welcomed, nonetheless, by Baghdadis. In the restaurants foreigners would be dining out at their peril. Abu Ali, our office cook, is preparing mazgouf for us tonight, but we’ll be eating it behind our blast walls.

Sean Maguire is Editor, Political and General News at Reuters

The disturbances in Kenya have prompted a thoughtful email from a member of the Media Council in the East African country. It pleads for restraint in reporting the details of tribal violence.

“When a person from a particular tribe sees a number of his/her tribesmen dead they may incite their fellow men to retaliate,” is the argument made. “Don’t turn Kenya into Iraq” is the message. That such a comparison can be contemplated speaks volumes for the levels of apprehension in Kenya now after days of post-election clashes.

The warning reminds me of the challenge news organisations face in reporting accurately without being perceived as inflaming volatile situations. At Reuters we believe the best defence against dangerous misinformation and rumour-mongering is solid eye-witness reporting and the use of dispassionate, accurate language. Our Kenya staff are out on the streets and in the slums, braving the tear gas and the machetes, to see for themselves. Our stories are laced with the observations of Reuters journalists. And we have been talking continuously to aid workers, NGOs, the Red Cross, rights groups, priests and the residents of affected areas. Experienced staff piece together an accurate account of events from that multiplicity of sources.

For Kenyans it is discomfiting that the tribal element to politics should loom suddenly so large. But it can’t be ignored. To give the full picture to our global readership we have to give well-sourced figures for death tolls and make clear the violence has roots in tribal rivalries. That is not inflammatory, it is informatory. Explaining why Kikuyu, Luo and Kalenjin should clash so bitterly does not provoke violence, it helps the reader see the complex origins of what might otherwise be presented as simple brutality.

In our reporting from Iraq there have been times when we were accused of stoking violence by reporting on it. But ignoring rising death tolls in 2003 and 2004 or the sectarian split of Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims would not have stopped the killing. It might have prolonged it by diverting attention from the reality of the problem. The same argument applied in Northern Ireland, which was riven by religious conflict. So too in Kenya.

However, the focus is not just on violence. Calls for calm, for mediation and for an end to violence have come from many quarters and Reuters has reported them prominently. As the story unfolds we’ll report thoroughly and honestly whether the calls have been heard.

Venezuela is a passionate place and its politics are particularly feisty. The fervent supporters of President Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution pit themselves against equally fervent opponents who believe he is driving the country to dictatorship and ruin. In such an atmosphere the local press becomes deeply politicised and many readers look outside to international news organisations to give them a balanced view in tumultuous times. That’s a role that Reuters takes very seriously.

For several hours before official results of Sunday’s referendum were released, Reuters reported senior government sources saying that Chavez was winning a vote that would allow him to contest elections for life and enshrine socialism as a state priority in the constitution. The sources were impeccable, including three cabinet ministers who had been correct in the past and who cited exit polls and early returns. The ministers told us Chavez was ahead by a hefty 6-8 points. An independent source also told us we were on the right track. But they were proved wrong. Chavez was defeated.

We’ve received many emails accusing us of a breach of trust, of favouritism and of incompetence. You’ll find a selection on the blog where we post reader comment.

Our mistake was not in using sources to get a beat on the story. We followed our own sourcing rules properly. We made clear that our sources were linked to the government and that we had talked to several senior figures. We specified where they said they had their information from.

We also made strenuous efforts to get the opposition’s point of view. But for a couple of hours we were unable to get them to comment. For some readers that left the impression that Reuters backed the government’s interpretation of events.

As the story developed and opposition conviction grew that the government’s numbers were wrong, we were slow to give the change the attention it merited. Some other news organizations emphasised that the vote was too close to call. In retrospect, it was an approach we should have taken.

We have provided comprehensive and distinguished coverage of the referendum, one of the most important stories in recent months in Latin America. We believe our reporting has been balanced and fair. Our stories strive to explain clearly why Chavez is loved and loathed in equal measure. We erred in this one instance, not from favouritism towards the Chavez government, but because we fell away from the high standards we set ourselves.

Thank you to all the readers who questioned our coverage.