adrian monck

Month: May 2007

  • The problem of informants: Kazi Rahman

    A while back the BBC reported on the conviction of Kazi Nurur Rahman. Rahman, you’ll recall, tried to buy Uzis, RPGs and SAM-7s for terrorist purposes. The Beeb’s report noted that: When interviewed by police Rahman claimed he was working for MI5, who had recruited him 10 years earlier. But, in pleading guilty to attempting…

  • The glory that was Rome

    Today at the Reuters Institute a fascinating collision of Italian and Anglo-Saxon journalism. (I can’t resist the Anglo-Saxon bit, it appeals to the medieval historian in me – the Venerable Bede would be proud.) The big theme was trust, and the Anglo-Italian contrast, but what came through for me were the personalities in Italian journalism:…

  • Anthony Mitchell

    Spare a thought for the family and friends of Anthony Mitchell, of the Associated Press, feared lost on Kenya Airways FQ 507. He was 39, married, with two young children. Here’s one of his stories from April on the U.S. government’s use of Ethiopian jails in its extraordinary rendition programme.

  • Journalism by numbers

    Next time you do a word count, check out one of the stats offered up by your word processor – the Flesch reading ease index. It was devised in the 1940s by an Austrian, Rudolf Flesch, and is a simple number crunching exercise that uses the number of words per sentence, and the number of…