Category Archives: Media

Beyoncé looked glorious on my magazine cover. ‘Are you going to lighten her skin?’ my boss asked

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Being urged to retouch then re-retouch the singer’s photo left Justine Cullen shaken. In this extract from her new book she recalls the ‘cookie cutter’ cycle her industry was trapped in

I stood and knocked tentatively on my publisher’s office door, holding a printout of my latest cover gingerly in my fingertips. The cover I held in my sweaty hands this time was Beyoncé, and she looked … well, she looked like Beyoncé. She looked perfect.

The publisher held the cover in her hands and looked at it approvingly. “It’s wonderful,” she said, nodding. I gave a relieved little sigh and turned to leave the room. But, just as I got to the door, she glanced back up from her computer screen and piped up, nonchalantly, as though having an afterthought: “Are you going to make her skin a little lighter?”

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Fifty new outlets, 250 journalists: Canadian startup unveils plan to revive local news

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As local papers close their doors, a morning newsletter defied the odds. Now its founder aims to push the model nationwide

Local journalism has shed jobs faster than the coal industry, leaving swaths of North America as news deserts with little or no regular coverage.

But the grim prospects for an industry in decline didn’t deter the Canadian tech entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson, who in 2019 hired a reporter and launched a daily newsletter in his home town, Victoria.

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Lucky review – spirited Ghanaian romcom captures the social media age

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An idling student enlists the help of a wideboy friend in pursuit of a hot date in a comedy that veers between likable and laddish

Here is a vibrant, idiosyncratic portrait of Ghanaian youth, bursting with wisecracks and a boyish restlessness. There is an amateurish shakiness to the visuals, but the film overcomes this with a lot of charm and an innate understanding of its young subjects.

Related: 20 best African films – ranked!

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Substack: how the game-changer turned poacher

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It started as a newsletter platform for unknown writers. Now it is becoming a media giant in its own right – with many of the problems it was supposed to avoid

Isabelle Roughol was done with her day job at LinkedIn and was ready to start something of her own. She quit in early 2020 and launched Borderline, a podcast and newsletter aimed at “defiant global citizens”, and to help her build it she became an early user of a new online service: Substack.

Substack has marketed itself aggressively to people such as Roughol as a new type of tech company, one that will let writers build their own brands and communities. The company offers software to help people set up free or paid-for newsletters and promises the people creating them that they can write what they want and that they own their own mailing list and can take it with them if they leave.

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UN catalogues ‘chilling tide of abuse’ against female journalists

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Misogyny, bigotry and threats ‘cut public trust in critical media’, warns report after major investigation

An epidemic of online violence against female journalists worldwide is undermining their reporting, spilling over into real-life attacks and harassment, and puts their health and professional prospects in jeopardy, the UN has warned.

The avalanche of misogynistic abuse and threats is not only damaging women working in media, it is also weaponised “to undercut public trust in critical journalism and facts in general”, a report commissioned by the UN’s cultural agency Unesco has found.

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Noel Clarke shows dropped as allegations shake TV industry

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ITV and Sky halt programmes featuring actor accused of sexual harassment and bullying

Allegations of sexual harassment and bullying made against the actor-producer Noel Clarke have shaken the film and television industry, prompting two broadcasters to cancel popular shows he was starring in and launching a debate about the treatment of women on sets.

The allegations against Clarke also led to questions about the decision by Bafta (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) to give the actor a special award for outstanding British contribution to cinema last month.

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‘Chilling’: Vanuatu libel bill prompts fears for free speech

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Bill placing libel under criminal rather than civil law could see journalists jailed for three years for ‘misleading’ content

Journalists and social media moderators in Vanuatu could face up to three years in prison under a new bill that broadly criminalises threatening words, gestures and the “reckless” sharing of false statements.

Changes to the criminal libel and slander provisions of the South Pacific country’s Penal Code Act mean that Ni-Vanuatu could now face imprisonment for “any representation that is untrue or misleading” on public platforms including “television, radio, internet websites, social networking sites and blog sites”.

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New York Post reporter quits citing pressure to write incorrect story about Kamala Harris

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Laura Italiano claimed she was forced to write a report about migrant children being given a copy of the VP’s book as part of a welcome kit

A reporter at Rupert Murdoch’s New York tabloid has resigned after she claimed she was forced to write an incorrect front page story about migrants and Kamala Harris.

The New York Post published an article on 23 April headlined “Kam on in”, which claimed migrant children were being given welcome packs that contained copies of the US vice-president’s 2019 children’s picture book, Superheroes Are Everywhere. A follow-up article claimed thousands of copies had been distributed.

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Burkina Faso: two Spanish journalists and Irish conservationist killed

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Spaniards David Beriáin and Roberto Fraile, and Rory Young, a Zambian-born Irish citizen, ambushed by jihadists

Two Spanish journalists and an Irish conservationist have been killed after they were ambushed by jihadists while on an anti-poaching mission in Burkina Faso.

On Tuesday, Spain’s foreign minister, Arancha González Laya, said 44-year-old David Beriáin, a reporter, and 47-year-old Roberto Fraile, a photographer, were believed to have been murdered on Monday, after they were identified from an image provided by Burkinabe authorities.

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‘Warm, kind, wise and brilliant’: Guardian writers remember Kakoli Bhattacharya

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Our Delhi correspondents pay tribute to the Indian journalist and Guardian news assistant, who has died of Covid

Every Guardian south Asia correspondent over the past decade can remember the first time they met Kakoli Bhattacharya. A smart, brilliant and tenacious journalist, Kakoli joined the Guardian in Delhi in 2009 as an assistant, translator and fixer – but the role she would play in the lives of all the correspondents who worked with her far outstripped her official duties.

On Saturday, Kakoli – who was known to her friends and family as Pui, meaning “birdsong” – died in hospital of Covid-19. She was 51. Her death leaves a great absence. Here, Delhi correspondents past and present share their lasting memories of a much valued colleague and friend.

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The Who Sell Out: still a searing satire on pop’s commercial breakdown

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Filled with product placement and advertising, the band’s newly reissued 1967 album put the pop in pop art, by showing how closely music was entwined with capital

These days, we think of the period between 1965 and 1967 as one of white-hot musical progress, a dizzying three-year period during which innovation followed innovation, a succession of totemic albums and singles were released and pop music changed irrevocably. But, as Jon Savage’s superb book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded made clear, not everyone at the time was impressed with how things were going. Savage’s research revealed a succession of contemporary naysayers, devoted to “ringing the death knell” as he put it: 1966 – The Year Pop Went Flat was noted music journalist Maureen Cleave’s assessment of 12 months that had seen the release of Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Reach Out (I’ll Be There), Eight Miles High, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and 19th Nervous Breakdown.

The most striking contemporary quote of all might be one that didn’t appear in Savage’s book. “People aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more, like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’,” it lamented, before qualifying: “I like some of the new sounds, purely as sound, that are coming out of pop music.”

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Guardian film Colette wins Oscar for best documentary short

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Film about a former resistance fighter travelling to visit the concentration camp where her brother died wins prize at the 93rd Academy Awards

• Watch the Guardian’s Oscar winning film, Colette

Colette, a film released by the Guardian, has won the Oscar for best documentary short at the 93rd Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

Written and directed by Anthony Giacchino, and produced by Alice Doyard, Annie Small and Aaron Matthews, Colette tells the story of 90-year-old former French resistance member Colette Marin-Catherine, who visits the concentration camp where her brother was murdered during the war with a young history student, Lucie Fouble.

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Footballers and clubs to boycott social media in mass protest over racist abuse

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Professionals and teams from top English leagues will log off Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for the whole of next weekend

The world of English professional football will unite for an unprecedented four-day boycott of social media next weekend to protest at the continued abuse and racism aimed at players.

Clubs in the English Premier League, English Football League, Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship will switch off their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts in response to “the ongoing and sustained discriminatory abuse” of footballers, and their despair over a lack of action from the tech companies.

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‘Guilty, guilty, guilty’: world’s media react to Chauvin trial verdict

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Analysis: relief and reflection sweep newsrooms as George Floyd case points to ‘turning point’ in US race relations

With intense international interest in the US trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, news organisations around the world had been live blogging the proceedings and were quick to reflect the ruling by the jury.

Most reporting focused on two themes: a sense of relief in the US that the jury had delivered a verdict many judged correct and the question over what it meant for the future of the US’s fraught racial relations.

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Netflix records dramatic slowdown in subscribers as pandemic boom wears off

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  • Streaming giant adds 4m subscribers, 2m below forecast
  • Company blames dearth of new content and last year’s growth

Netflix reported a dramatic slowdown in subscribers in the first three months of 2021, ending a record run in growth during the coronavirus pandemic.

The streaming giant added 4 million new subscribers in the first quarter, 2 million fewer than its original estimate of 6 million and a quarter of the 8 million it added in the last three months of 2020. The company expects to add only about 1 million subscribers in the current quarter, which would be its slowest growth on record.

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Shadow and Bone star Jessie Mei Li: ‘Fans find out everything’

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The actor is about to hit the TV big time as a girl with special powers in Netflix’s new young adult fantasy. And the internet is in a frenzy

Jessie Mei Li currently inhabits a weird stratum of celebrity. At 25 years old, her biggest screen credit to date has been a single episode of the Channel 5 docudrama Banged Up Abroad. She hasn’t worked for a year. And yet, at the same time, a growing portion of the internet has become borderline hysterical about her.

Search for her name and you’ll get the idea. There are tweets declaring things like “Jessie Mei Li you have my whole heart” and “I believe in Jessie Mei Li supremacy”. There are more than a dozen Jessie Mei Li stan accounts on Instagram – fan-based accounts dedicated to a particular celebrity – many of them shrieking their obsession in frenzied all-caps captions several times a day. Tumblr, as you might expect, is an almighty mess.

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Oppression of journalists in China ‘may have been factor in Covid pandemic’

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China placed 177th in Press Freedom Index, with warning that persecution of reporters can have international impact

Persecution of journalists in China may have contributed to the global coronavirus outbreak by stopping whistleblowers coming forward in the early days of the pandemic, according to the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.

China ranks 177th out of 180 countries on the organisation’s annual Press Freedom Index, with the organisation warning that persecution of journalists in totalitarian regimes affects citizens in western democracies.

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Game of Thrones at 10: can a deluge of publicity preserve its legacy?

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For many viewers, the final season ruined years of fandom. Enter HBO with a month of celebrations which they hope will lead to renewed interest in GoT – and its upcoming spinoffs

It’s time to crack open Cersei’s favourite Dornish wine and fill an incongruous takeaway coffee cup to the brim: Game of Thrones is 10 years old. To mark the occasion, HBO has inaugurated the Iron Anniversary, a month-long celebration honouring the grandiose but battle-scarred show based on George RR Martin’s as yet uncompleted cycle of fantasy doorstop novels. In traditional GoT fashion, there are merchandising tie-ins, from figurines to a commemorative IPA. But the main thrust of the Iron Anniversary seems to be the series itself: a ceremonial reminder that all eight seasons and 73 instalments are still available to watch on HBO Max (or Sky Atlantic/Now/Amazon Prime in the UK); the campaign announcements encourage fans to return to their favourite bloodthirsty battle episode or embark on a binge-watch “MaraThrone”.

Related: The battle of the binge: should you watch Game of Thrones in lockdown?

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Facebook and fear in Manila: Maria Ressa’s fight for facts

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Ex-CNN reporter and founder of the news site Rappler on life under the relentless social media assault of the Duterte regime

As terrible as the events were that played out on Capitol Hill on 6 January, Maria Ressa admits to feeling “a small amount of relief” about them. An ex-CNN bureau chief, and now the founder of her own news organisation, Rappler, she had spent the past two years sounding a warning about what she’d seen happen in her native country, the Philippines.

There, a Facebook-fuelled tsunami of lies had assisted an authoritarian into power. And she had seen where that had led: to opponents of the state being killed in their homes or turning up dead in ditches. As a Filipino American with a foot in both countries – she calls herself “the first of the CNN hybrids” – she was perfectly positioned to warn America about what happens when a populist president is allowed to spread out-of-control lies across a vast, unregulated tech platform. “A lie told a million times becomes a fact,” she repeated again and again.

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‘In this world, social media is everything’: how Dubai became the planet’s influencer capital

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Once a small port on the edge of a desert, Dubai is now a magnet for reality stars and a jet set crowd looking to beat the vaccine queue. But do the filtered images tell the whole story?

On the electric blue tarmac of a helipad on the edge of Palm Jumeirah, an artificial island on the Dubai coastline, Busra Duran stands on tiptoes. Wearing multicoloured trainers and a pink tulle minidress, the 28-year-old Turkish influencer is posing for photos in front of a red helicopter. Her husband, Gökhan Gündüz, snaps away as she models her pink sunglasses in the shadow of the Atlantis, a blush-coloured hotel with green pointed rooftops which resembles the fake castles of Disneyland’s Magic Kingdom.

‘Gündüz, 29, wears a striped T-shirt with the word “positive” emblazoned around the collar. Duran skips over to check the photos he’s taken, before they discuss her Instagram shots from the ride. Duran approached the helicopter company to request this free 12-minute tour, the shortest available, and they were happy to oblige. “It was amazing,” she says, flatly, sounding unconvinced. The trip is one of a whole roster of experiences Duran has set up for the benefit of her 608,000 Instagram followers. In a few days, the couple have arranged to play golf – another free gift – and Duran often poses for pictures at restaurants in exchange for a meal. Her glittering Dubai lifestyle is displayed on her Instagram: one day she’ll be perching on the side of a bubble bath in an upmarket hotel reading a copy of Gulf News; the next in a red swimsuit beside a pool, a glass of rosé in one hand and a copy of a Paulo Coelho novel in front of her.

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