I’ve written before  that a camera is not a weapon, that a journalist is not a combatant, that the pen and the sword should not be confused.

Yet the Israel Defense Forces seem to be putting the camera very much in the category of weapon in a report on the death in April of Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana.

I’ve given a quote to our reporters about my disappointment in the report.

That it does state that the death was a “tragedy†does not counteract the fact that it condoned the firing of two deadly shells at people it admitted had not been identified clearly and whose only crime was to put a camera on a tripod.

Said the report: “Two persons were spotted leaving the vehicle, carrying a large black object. The black object was placed on a tripod above a dirt mound, and directed at the tank…. The tank crew reported the spotting to its superiors. The latter authorized firing a tank shell at the characters, in light of the genuine suspicion that the object mounted on the tripod and directed at the tank was an anti-tank missile or mortar, a suspicion consistent with the characteristics of that day’s hostilities…â€

I do understand the stresses of the battlefield.

I do understand that wars are horribly dangerous – Reuters has had close calls in Georgia; colleagues from other organizations have been killed.

I do not understand the deliberate decision to fire on the basis of suspicion and uncertainty.

I wonder how journalists can do their job if doing that job raises such suspicion in the eyes of the Israeli or any other military.

The dangers seem too great.

And yet, the stakes of not reporting a war to the world are too high as well.

“…the tank crew was unable to determine the nature of the object mounted on the tripod and positively identify it as an anti-tank missile, a mortar, or a television camera,†the report said.

To me, killing on the basis of such little certainty makes the death of Fadel Shana much more than just a tragedy.

For a little more investigation, a little more military intelligence, would have shown clearly that he was just a professional doing his job.

And that his camera was a weapon only for the truth.

 Photo:  

Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana looks out of the window at the Reuters office in Gaza City April 4, 2006. Shana, 23, and two other Palestinian civilians were killed on April 16, 2008, in what local residents said was an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip. Picture taken April 4, 2006. REUTERS/Don Pessin

Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote about “Anonymice” and tracked use of anonymous sources in the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Portfolio’s Zubin Jelveh then followed up with a post that included some statistics about Reuters use vs. other news organizations.

In the interest of transparency, I’m posting Reuters basic guidance on sourcing (we also have detailed guidance that expands on the points below):

We don’t always get it right. There are times we should have pressed harder to get a source to go on the record with his or her name; there are times when we should have spiked (thrown away) a story because the sourcing wasn’t totally up to our standards.

But I think the record of our 2,500 journalists is on balance a good one: we use anonymous sources judiciously and in the interest of getting important stories. In the end it’s what you, our readers, think that matters - you’re the ultimate arbiter of our credibility.

 (photo credit: Journalists wait outside the Lenval Hospital where U.S. actress Angelina Jolie gave birth to twins in Nice, southern France, July 13, 2008. REUTERS/Chris Serrano)

The Biblical image of alchemy is powerful:They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.

Yet, once again, the alchemy went the wrong way: a soldier mistook a camera for a weapon, fired his real weapon, and a journalist was killed.

Fadel Shana, 24, filming an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip was killed by that very tank on April 16.

Two months later, there are still no satisfactory answers.

What about his camera could have been confused for a weapon?

What about his “Press”-emblazoned car or flak jacket was ambiguous?

What about his peaceful actions filming a news story could possibly have seemed aggressive?

What motivated the tank commander to fire thousands of flechettes, sharp and deadly steel darts, before positively identifying his target and without warning?

Answers to these questions are important. They are important for Fadel Shana’s family and colleagues; they are important for justice; they are important to save the lives of journalists in the future; they are important for all of us who rely upon journalists in places, near and far, safe and unsafe, to bring us the stories that let us know what is really happening in the world.

A television camera is not a weapon; it is a potent tool for truth. A pen is not a sword; its blade separates truth and fiction and empowers readers to judge their world. A journalist is not a combatant; a journalist is an agent for exposing the facts and giving the world needed transparency.

These truths hold in the corridors of Congress; these truths hold in the banking halls of London’s City; these truths must hold on the battlefields from Baghdad to Gaza as well.

The world needs to know. The world’s citizens need to know. And if journalists are killed while doing their job or for doing their job, the world loses a bit of its brightness and transparency, and the truth will be hidden.

The Israel Defense Forces issued a welcome statement immediately after Fadel Shana was killed, saying: “The IDF wishes to emphasize that unlike terrorist organizations not only does not it deliberately target uninvolved civilians; it also uses means to avoid such incidents.”

The best way to ensure these ideals to be realized would be for the IDF and other military to work intimately with news organizations so tragedies like that of Fadel Shana’s death won’t happen again.

A military that has sophisticated intelligence and identification methods can learn to tell a camera from a gun. A military that works hard to prevent deaths of its own by friendly fire can learn to investigate vehicles and garments clearly marked as “Press”. A military that seeks to save “uninvolved civilians” can use restraint with the firing of shells filled with indiscriminate, deadly darts.

And governments and military that understand the role of the press in serving society’s need for truth must learn better to respect the lives of journalists working for that purpose.

This was the title of a panel I joined at the Social Media Influence event earlier this week in London. It was a slightly tongue-in-cheek question from Matthew Yeomans, one of the conference’s organisers, but interesting because it touches on a number of current trends — the phenomenal rise of video usage on the Web, the success of user-generated video sites and the impression that, perhaps, blogging has become a bit passe. Just this week we’ve seen a new study show that online video consumption has nearly doubled in the past year while new social video services are growing very quickly and Youtube recently appointed a citizen video news editor.

This was the full brief:

In a way the event answered the question itself. One of the participants, the BBC’s Robin Hamman, who I had thought was going to be on the panel instead streamed the proceedings live via his mobile phone to Qik where it is now archived. So now I’m thinking why blog about the event when you can see the whole thing on Qik? And, in my case, why write a note to my boss when I can just point him to the full recording and (slightly scary thought) he can make up his own mind on how it went?

In preparing for the event I did a couple of things. First, I thought about my professional experience within Reuters. We’ve got perhaps a couple of hundred journalists blogging on a regular basis but just a handful video blogging. That’s partly because video is still a bit tricky while blogging is relatively easy since, in essence, it’s just a text-based content management system and nearly all our journalists are writing on a very regular basis.

But that’s the view from a mainstream media organisation. What’s the picture in the blogging world? I asked a number of people in the Global Voices blogging network for a perspective. These are people who live and breathe blogging. They deal with the realities of handling content using social media day in, day out and from the four corners of the globe. I thought their answers gave the topic a deeper perspective that I struggled to get across to the London audience.

Solana Larsen

Georgia Popplewell

Juliana Rincon

Instead of writing this I could have recorded a two minute ‘piece to camera’ (will we start calling these items ‘pieces to mobile’?) and uploaded it to a social media platform. I haven’t done that because I just don’t think I’d have been able to tell the story as well. I like the flexibility that blogging gives me. I’ve got video here, I’ve been able to link to underlying sources, I’ve been able to use all the media there is. And very quickly.This feels like genuine multimedia production that plays to each medium’s strengths. I just can’t see video alone eclipsing this ability to weave media strands together.

Picture credit: Social Media Influence

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.