Media Insider: Covering Climate Change, Murrow Journalists Visit Top J-Schools, WaPo’s Rezaian Sentenced to Prison

Welcome to Media Insider, PR Newswire’s round up of journalism, blogging and freelancing stories from the last two weeks.

Photo by gfpeck used under CC BY-ND 2.0

Five Interactive Ways News Outlets are Covering Climate Change (Journalism.co.uk)

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference is taking place in Paris. Most news organizations are there to cover it and the changes around climate change, addressing measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Journalism.co.uk features examples news coverage by media outlets, including The New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg Business, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal.

Edward R. Murrow Journalists Visit Top J-Schools (FishbowlNY)

Ninety journalists from 80 countries traveled across the U.S. for this year’s edition of the State Department’s Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists, ending their activities in New York. After some time in Washington, journalists split up into groups and “traveled to universities in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Minnesota, New York and Oklahoma, visiting local news organizations and important cultural sites along the way.” Visiting journalism schools are a landmark of the Murrow program, FishbowlNY says “offering participants an academic perspective and chances to engage with students and professors, while developing a deeper understanding of local communities across the country.”

How One Blog Helped Spark The New York Times’ Digital Evolution (Nieman Journalism Lab)

In 2007, The New York Times launched several blogs roughly around the same time. Among them was City Room, the metro blog that played a big part in the newspaper’s rise in digital journalism. Prior to blogs like City Room, “most of what appeared at NYTimes.com in those early years was a simple duplicate of what ran in print. By the 2000s, blogs and other online forms were building a new vocabulary for publishing on the web, and the Gray Lady wasn’t always keeping up, looking fusty and staid next to its digital peers,” Nieman Lab reports. Last month, NYT announced it was formally shutting down City Room.

Post Correspondent Jason Rezaian Sentenced to Prison Term in Iran (The Washington Post)

Washington Post Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian, who has been held in Iran for the past 16 months for charges including espionage, has been sentenced to a prison term. In announcing a conviction in October, Iranian authorities did not provide any details of the verdict, The Washington Post reports. Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, a spokesman for Iran’s judiciary, did not articulate the length of Rezaian’s prison term. Mohseni-Ejei said: “The verdict has been issued but has not been officially handed down to the accused or his lawyer. Given the fact that the verdict has not been officially handed down, I cannot reveal the details, but what I can say is that the accused has been sentenced to prison.”

Vox.com is Snapchat’s Newest Discover Publisher (Digiday)

Snapchat added Vox.com to its Discover feature this week. Vox is not the “first news publisher to get a channel on the messaging app, but like BuzzFeed and Mashable, it’s arguably more millennial-focused than CNN, which was among the first on Discover, and The Wall Street Journal, which is expected to be added soon,” Digiday reports. With Discover, Vox hopes to reach the audience that advertisers salivate over; Snapchat claims to reach more than 100 million users, most of them young people, Digiday says.

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Christine Cube is an audience relations manager with PR Newswire and freelance writer. Follow @cpcube or check out her latest on Beyond Bylines on PR Newswire for Journalists.