By Kendra Book, Thomson Reuters

Remember how you used to pass notes in class? You wrote your note with the recipient’s name on it and hoped that through a chain of middle-men the note would eventually reach its destination. Along the way the note would probably be opened, possibly intercepted by the teacher or could be dropped. Quinn Norton, a panelist at Yale Law School’s ISP Protecting Journalists Conference, says this is a perfect metaphor for the way that the Internet processes and relays your personal information.

Protecting Journalism: Anonymous & Secure Communication for Reporters & Sources, held on November 29 at Yale Law School, was a full-day conference featuring three two-hour panels that discussed the gap between security risks and actual security; faith in anonymous communications and security; and the “tradeoff” between security and usability. Bryan Choi, a Thomson Reuters Fellow at Yale Law School, hosted the event and Marius Bosch, Reuters News deputy general manager for EMEA, responsible for Editorial operations in Africa and for information security globally, was a panelist. (more…)

As South Sudan marks its one-year anniversary, many journalists are being harassed by the government. Now they’re speaking out.

Check out the four-part Reuters Special Report on the South Sudan: (more…)

“…the most time consuming debate was not over the numbers of staff deployed or the costs involved but over the gender of staff assigned.” Chris Cramer of Reuters News and Honorary President, International News Safety Institute quote opened the IWD Event at the Thomson Reuters Canary Wharf offices.

Included as part of his preface for the book “No Woman’s Land,” which was launched that night, set the scene for the debate that flourished over the next 60 minutes. Starting with a silent tribute to the fallen female journalists made the clearest statement on the challenges and demonstrated the potential sacrifice these women and men sometimes make in their commitment to tell the story.

The book and the journalists on the panel, moderated by Lyse Doucet of the BBC, were all there to talk about their experiences, focusing on the safety and challenges for female journalists. Highly topical, with the recent death of Maria Colvin in February this year, the discussion took twists and turns around safety issues for all journalists, along with whether a woman’s role in the frontline of reporting in danger zones was accepted by editorial management and the public in general. The panel included war photographer Kate Brooks, Sky News Head of International News Sarah Whitehead, CNN Presenter Nima Elbagir, Reuters reporter Maria Golovnina and Head of News for BBC World News Andrew Roy.

Most of the panel and the audience started with several comments saying there were no gender issues and stating that the intent was always to send the most appropriate journalist in all cases. However, quickly we heard of situations where female journalists did feel that becoming a mother limited their opportunities to cover certain stories and their career. Gender bias certainly did seem to be an issue in the discussion that followed. There is no doubt it exists widely beyond just journalism and in many cases it is the unconscious bias that is most difficult to detect and address.  There remains a view by many in society that a woman’s key role as nurturer should overrule their career ambitions and they should be more responsible than to place themselves in these dangerous situations. We all have a level of unconscious bias and most often we are not even aware of where it came from and how it is impacting us.

Safety however was the key focus. The book was triggered by the shocking assault on CBS News journalist Lara Logan in Egypt in 2011 and tells the stories of over 30 women journalists from more than a dozen countries, including Lara Logan.  They describe the risks, the challenges and the emotional and physical impact on their lives and give key safety tips.

Join this complimentary best practices webinar to hear Reuters journalists discuss how they use social media to identify story ideas, do research and monitor the marketplace.

• Learn how best to engage journalists using emerging technology.
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Can’t make the live webinar? Not to worry. If you register, you will receive access to the on-demand version which will be available after the live event. View it at your convenience.

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Thursday, April 12, 2012
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This post originally ran on our Legal Current Blog.

We all know Westlaw is a useful tool for law librarians and attorneys, but you may not know that Westlaw benefits another group – journalists.

As we highlighted in a previous post, with the wealth of information on Westlaw, it’s no wonder Reuters journalists such as Brian Grow use it to help them pursue investigative stories. One example of this is a recent story Brian and fellow journalist Kelly Carr crafted that begins with a small house in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Through their research, they discovered that this 1,700-square-foot house serves as the headquarters for a company called Wyoming Corporate Services. With more than 2,000 companies registered there, Wyoming Corporate Services specializes in establishing shell and “shelf” corporations, which are companies that exist only on paper without assets or operations . Shelf corporations provide a variety of benefits to companies, such as easier access to credit and bidding on contracts. Shell and shelf corporations are not in themselves illegal; however, they are a popular vehicle in the underground economy and have been used to commit fraud on an international scale.

Brian worked with Westlaw contacts Mary Kivimaki and Leah Hauge, both former reference attorneys, to gather research and documentation on the house in Wyoming. He calls Westlaw a “one-stop shop to support a story.”

With only the address in Cheyenne to start with, Brian searched in Westlaw public records databases and found dozens of supporting documents from companies that had been using the house for their shell and shelf companies. With access to this information he and Kelly were able to uncover quite a story. Read the full story here.

Brian says that he has used Westlaw as a resource many times and that it is a growing trend among fellow Reuters reporters. “I can’t overstate how valuable Westlaw is to Reuters journalists,” says Brian.

The way Reuters journalists use Westlaw for research is just one example of how we share our incredible depth of content with different sides of the business. To learn more about another endeavor in which journalists are teaming up with Westlaw, check out our Legal Current blog post on Thomson Reuters News and Insight.