Top news sites collectively received 7.5% fewer visits on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the 2024 US election than they did on those days in 2020, data from Similarweb shows.

The Associated Press, Substack and Axios were among the sites with the most growth between the two elections, while Politico, Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times all lost substantial proportions of their traffic – according to Similarweb.

After aggregator Yahoo.com (130.6 million visits on Tuesday 5 and Wednesday 6 November) CNN was the most-visited news site in the US, drawing 109.1 million clicks. That figure is down 19.4% on the same days in the 2020 election.

The New York Times (62.4 million) was the second most-visited publisher, but its traffic too dropped 36.3%. Fox News, the third most popular publisher on the list, saw traffic drop 46.8% when compared with the 2020 election, the fifth-largest fall among the top 50 most-visited sites.

Among the ten most-visited news sites over election night, Fox was the biggest faller, followed by The New York Times and CNN. The AP (47.6 million visits, up 247.1%) was the biggest gainer, followed by NBC News (44.3 million, up 120.2%) and USA Today (27.7 million, up 70.1%). The rest of the top ten saw single-digit percentage point changes.

The significant declines at the most-visited sites may reflect broader news avoidance trends or the relative speed with which the result of the 2024 election became clear. The 2020 election, in comparison, took days to be called.

Among the broader top 50 election night news sites the fastest grower was Axios, which saw visits grow 291.7% from 1.8 million in 2020 to 7.2 million last week.

Faster growing still was publishing platform Substack (5.1 million, up 423.1%), which hosts publications by numerous journalists and was less than three years old at the time of the last election.

Web culture site The Daily Dot (2.2m, up 287.5%), Al Jazeera (3.3 million, up 204.2%) and People magazine (11.5 million, up 115.5%) also substantially outperformed their 2020 traffic totals.

The biggest fall, on the other hand, was at Politico (8.8 million visits in 2024, down 63.7% from its 2020 total of 24.3 million), followed by Yahoo News (5.4 million, down 54.8%) and Business Insider (4.2 million, down 48.8%). The Guardian (10.6 million, down 45.2%) Google News (11.3 million, down 40.2%) and Breitbart (3.9 million, down 48.5%) were all also significantly hit.

NBC News, Associated Press and climate site The Cooldown saw largest election week traffic surges

Similarweb data also shows that, among the 100 top news sites in the US, NBC News saw the largest week-on-week increase in its web traffic over the week of the election, with visits nearly tripling compared with the week before.

Climate website The Cooldown saw a comparable increase of 209.4% and the AP received 207% more traffic than the previous week.

A handful of sites saw fewer visits the week of the election than the week before, among them Cosmopolitan (down 15.1%), Variety (down 13.2%) and Vogue (down 8%).

The post Top publishers saw less traffic on day of 2024 US election versus 2020 appeared first on Press Gazette.

Press Gazette is honoured to announce the finalists for the British Journalism Awards 2024.

This year’s British Journalism Awards attracted 750 entries encompassing every major news organisation in the UK.

The finalists are announced today following a three-week process involving 80 independent judges and two days of jury-style meetings.

In order to make the shortlists work has to be revelatory, show journalistic skill and rigour and serve the public interest.

The winners will be announced on 12 December at a dinner in London hosted by Radio 2 presenter and journalist Jeremy Vine.

Details here about how to book tickets.

The shortlist for News Provider of the Year will be announced following a second round of judging. The winners of Journalist of the Year, the Marie Colvin Award and the Public Service prize will be announced on the night.

Chairman of judges and Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford said: “Without journalism, Boris Johnson would still be prime minister, wronged postmasters would not have a voice and victims of the infected blood scandal would not have a chance of compensation.

“The 2024 British Journalism Awards shortlists celebrate the stories which would not be told without journalists willing to shine a light on uncomfortable truths and publications brave enough to back them up.

“Congratulations to all our finalists and thank you to everyone who took the time to enter the British Journalism Awards.

“In a media world which is increasingly controlled by a few parasitic technology platforms it is more important than ever to celebrate the publishers willing to invest in and support quality journalism that makes a difference for the better in our world.”

British Journalism Awards 2024 shortlist in full:

Social Affairs, Diversity & Inclusion Journalism

Natasha Cox, Ahmed El Shamy, Rosie Garthwaite — BBC Eye Investigations

• Perfume’s Dark Secret

Jessica Hill — Schools Week

• Missing from mainstream: Excluded children with nowhere to go
• ‘Out of sight, out of mind’: The rise of unregistered alternative provision
• Hospital schools: On the mental health crisis frontline

Sasha Baker, Valeria Rocca — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• The parents group at the centre of a rollback of trans rights
• ‘One day they may thank us for that “abuse”’: Inside the Bayswater Support Group

Rianna Croxford, Ruth Evans, Cate Brown, Ed McGown, Tom Stone, Ed Campbell, Karen Wightman — BBC Panorama

• The Abercrombie Guys: The Dark Side of Cool

Daniel Hewitt, Imogen Barrer, Mariah Cooper, Reshma Rumsey — ITV News

• Nowhere to go: Britain’s homeless emergency

Louise Tickle — Tortoise Media

• Taking the stand: Grace’s story
• Taking the stand: Emma’s story

Abi Kay — Farmers Weekly

• Level the Field
• Is there a problem with young farmer culture?
• Editor’s view: Facing hard truths about young farmer culture

Joshua Nelken-Zitser, Ida Reihani, Kit Gillet — Business Insider

• Iran will pay for gender-transition surgery, but it comes at a cost — your dignity

Features Journalism

Sophie Elmhirst — 1843 magazine, The Economist and The Guardian

• The last stand of the call-centre worker
• Chortle chortle, scribble scribble: inside the Old Bailey with Britain’s last court reporters
• Last love: a romance in a care home

Jenny Kleeman — The Guardian

• America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’
• She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all
• ‘I know someone who played noughts and crosses on one’: meet the top surgeon who burned his initials on a patient’s liver

Sirin Kale — The Guardian

• ‘My child was drowning’: life and death on an English maternity ward
• The life and tragic death of John Balson: how a true crime producer documented his own rising horror
• The Russell murders: is Michael Stone in prison for a brutal crime he didn’t commit?

Zoe Beaty — The Independent

• How Nigel Farage took over my hometown – and why Keir Starmer should be worried
• My battle to bring a predatory Met Police officer from the same unit as Wayne Couzens to justice
• ‘A court packed with those who know their way around already, and jails are too full to take them’

Inderdeep Bains — Daily Mail

• My doctors insist it’s time I died – but I will fight them: Extraordinary case of 19-year-old woman suffering from Charlie Gard condition battling medics’ attempts to ‘condemn her to death’
• Sudiksha: ‘Condemned to Die in Secret’ – The Shocking Story of the 19-year-old’s fight to live

David James Smith — The Independent

• How did so many miss the sinister warning signs about James Bulger’s killer for so long?
• Is Lucy Letby innocent? I’m a miscarriage of justice investigator – and here’s what I think…
• The wife of this Murdoch executive has been missing since the Sixties – will her body now be found?

Fiona Hamilton — The Times

• Nottingham attacks: ‘We have no faith in the police. We want justice’
• ‘A horrible way to die … and no doctors can help you’
• Realising Sarah Everard got into a sex offender’s car was horrific

Barbara McMahon — Daily Mail

• Ghislaine Maxwell ‘was tortured in prison – now she’s ready for a comeback’: Jeffrey Epstein’s socialite pimp runs half marathons at low-security Florida lock-up and is now ‘focused and motivated’ for her appeal next week, her brother reveals
• ‘I shook Epstein’s hand and asked him what my daughter would be doing’: Virginia Roberts’s father describes dropping her off at paedophile’s mansion, meeting ‘despicable’ Ghislaine… and blasts Prince Andrew for showing ‘no remorse’
• Black Widow who ‘relished killing and had no regard for human life, even for children’: Griselda Blanco shot a child in the head when she was 11 and rose to be Miami’s drug kingpin. As she’s immortalised on Netflix, her son recalls his ‘fearsome’ mother

Local Journalism

Abi Whistance, Joshi Herrmann, Kate Knowles, Mollie Simpson, Jothi Gupta — Mill Media

• Special investigation: The collapsing world of Liverpool’s charity kingpin
• Investigation: The spectacular rise and sudden fall of Gurpaal Judge
• Exclusive: How did a semi in Harpurhey sell for £1.8m?

Richard Newman, Jennifer O’Leary, Gwyneth Jones, Chris Thornton — BBC Spotlight

• Katie: Coerced and Killed

Sam McBride — Belfast Telegraph

• Lough Neagh has become a scene of Biblical disaster, and Stormont was central to its destruction
• Killing Edgar podcast

Chris Burn — The Yorkshire Post

• Building societies scandal: Yorkshire victims reveal shocking stories – and plead for action to be taken
• Philips Trust: FCA got ‘Ponzi scheme’ warning on firm at heart of £138m building society scandal – 18 months before collapse
• Leeds, Newcastle and Nottingham Building Societies to pay tens of millions to Philips Trust victims

Jane Haynes — Birmingham Mail and Birmingham Mail/Post

• Teacher’s ‘life blown apart’ in onslaught of hate as false racism claim goes viral
• The truth exposed about ‘secretive’ council meeting on equal pay crisis in Birmingham
• ‘Like a prison’ – the tower block for homeless families that has 8pm curfew and no visitors allowed

Wendy Robertson — The Bridge

• The Bridge newsletter

Health & Life Sciences Journalism

Rebecca Thomas — The Independent

• Mental health patients ‘raped and sexually assaulted’ as NHS abuse scandal revealed
• Nicholas’s story: ‘I’ve been locked up for 10 years because I’m autistic. Is a chance at life too much to ask?’
• Revealed: NHS regulator’s ‘culture of fear’ that leaves rogue nurses free to abuse patients

Fin Johnston — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• Science for sale: Philip Morris’s web of payments to fund tobacco research
• Inside the strategy doc Philip Morris never meant you to see
• Tobacco state: why Japan was the perfect testing ground for Philip Morris

Hannah Barnes — The New Statesman

• The trauma ward
• The Cass Review into children’s gender care should shame us all
• Hundreds of doctors are challenging the BMA’s stance on puberty blockers

Robbie Boyd, Eamonn Matthews, Steve Grandison, Ian Bendelow, Sophie Borland, Katie O’Toole, Islay Stacey, Ali Watt, Frances Peters — Quicksilver Media for Channel 4 Dispatches

• Undercover A&E: NHS in Crisis

Ellie Pitt, Cree Haughton, Justina Simpson, Ellie Swinton, Patrick Russell, Liam Ayers — ITV News

• The Dark Side of Cosmetic Surgery

Martin Bagot — Daily Mirror

• Day in the life of a dentist – and why it’s nothing like you imagine as NHS nears collapse
• Britain’s dental health crisis exposed as hundreds of children in hospital with bad teeth
• Urgent warning amid fears cosmetic fillers could cause immune system problems

Hanna Geissler — Daily Express

• ‘I’m terminally ill – assisted dying must be legalised so my daughter won’t see me suffer’
• Assisted dying ‘allowed me to mostly forget’ fears, says Aussie man hit by brain tumour
• Dame Esther’s assisted dying petition delivered to Prime Minister’s doorstep

Crime & Legal Affairs Journalism

Sue Mitchell, Rob Lawrie, Joel Moors, Winifred Robinson, Dan Clarke, Philip Sellars, Tom Brignell, Mom Tudie — BBC

• To Catch a Scorpion
• How we found Europe’s most wanted migrant-smuggler
• Why the BBC could track down a people-smuggling kingpin before the police

Gabriel Pogrund, Katie Tarrant — The Sunday Times

• Millionaire’s ‘sex worker immigration scandal’
• Hamish Ogston: millionaire accused of exploiting women ‘set up charity to help win knighthood’
• Hamish Ogston: tycoon asked Met to arrest woman who accused him of sex trafficking

Mike Sullivan, Jerome Starkey, Mike Ridley — The Sun

• ‘Distraught’ Holly Willoughby under police guard after man is arrested over terrifying ‘kidnap plot’
• Police chief faces ‘Walter Mitty’ probe after being pictured wearing Falklands medal despite being 15 at time of war

Hannah Summers — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• Family Court Files: mother ‘devastated’ after rapist father granted contact with child
• Family Court Files: Psychologist’s evidence used to ‘ramp up’ allegations of parental alienation
• Kristoffer White: TBIJ wins court battle to publish name of sex offender

Rianna Croxford, Ruth Evans — BBC Panorama and BBC News

• Abercrombie & Fitch ex-CEO accused of exploiting men for sex
• Lawsuit accuses Abercrombie & Fitch of funding sex-trafficking operation
• FBI investigate after ex-Abercrombie boss sex claims

Isobel Yeung, Alex Nott, Esme Ash, Nick Parnes, Alistair Jackson, Matt Bardo, Sarah Wilson — Channel 4 Dispatches

• Britain’s Unsolved Crimewave: Dispatches

Comment Journalism

Daniel Finkelstein — The Times

• Israelis and Palestinians must start to listen
• Wes Streeting’s lessons from Richard Nixon and China
• Here’s the Keir Starmer I’ve known for decades

Matthew Syed — The Sunday Times

• When I was at school a teacher could call me the P-word. We’ve come so far
• The storm is gathering, and Europe is still dithering on defending itself
• Locked in by language, we are freed by music, poetry, painting … and love

Will Hayward — WalesOnline/The Will Hayward Newsletter

• The most pointless job in Wales
• The worst political leader in the UK
• Bluster, fluster and ‘word salad’ nonsense: Vaughan Gething ducks and weaves like a boxer at the Welsh Covid Inquiry

Kitty Donaldson — i

• Part political update, part group therapy: inside Starmer’s Cabinet meeting
• Grenfell is a tragic reminder to the Tories that regulation is not a dirty word
• The winter fuel row is a painful wake up call for new Labour MPs

Frances Ryan — The Guardian

• A summer defined by men killing women and girls. This can’t go on
• Think of this: a plan to ‘warehouse’ disabled people. What kind of nation is Britain becoming?
• Cropped out, banned, airbrushed: the school photos that show the ugly face of Britain today

Duncan Robinson — The Economist

• Why the next Westminster scandal is already here
• The narcissism of minor differences, Labour Party edition
• British boomers are losing out for the first time

Specialist Journalism

Peter Blackburn — The Doctor (by the British Medical Association)

• Nowhere left to turn
• Fears for patient care due to shortages of chronic alcohol misuse treatment Pabrinex
• Not the only failing

Lucinda Rouse, Emily Burt, Ollie Peart, Louise Hill, David Robinson, Rebecca Cooney, Andy Ricketts, Nav Pal, Til Owen — Third Sector

• The End of Charity podcast

Lucie Heath — i

• Revealed: Water firms dumped sewage 5,500 times in a year ‘illegally’
• Revealed: The hidden sewage spills damaging our national parks and beauty spots
• Toxic water, debt and sewage dumping: How Britain’s rivers got so bad

Deborah Cohen, Margaret McCartney — BMJ/Pharmaceutical Journal

• Inclisiran: the ‘extremely unusual’ political influence behind the novel drug’s approval
• Galleri promises to detect multiple cancers—but new evidence casts doubt on this much hyped blood test
• Inclisiran: Government’s strategy to promote cholesterol lowering drug after Brexit was “spectacular failure,” says insider

Lee Mottershead — Racing Post

• Revealed: the racehorse owner fronting an illegal bookmaker with more than 1,000 customers
• ‘People don’t want to provide bank statements. We’ve got so many people betting with us’

Jessica Hill — Schools Week

• The rise of the parent activist
• AI’s allure is proving hard to resist for the UK’s learners
• ‘Out of sight, out of mind’: The rise of unregistered alternative provision

Emily Townsend — Health Service Journal

• Over 30 sepsis deaths linked to ‘systemic’ failings, investigation reveals
• Revealed: Doubling of average waits for critical stroke treatments
• Midwives call women in labour ‘Asian princesses’ amid ‘hostile’ environment fears

Roya Nikkhah — The Sunday Times

• Prince Harry at 40: ‘All he does is spend time looking back’
• The hospital heart-to-hearts that brought Kate and King even closer
• Prince William to build houses for homeless on his land in Cornwall

Foreign Affairs Journalism

Christina Lamb — The Sunday Times

• Gun in hand, the Israeli settler tells the Palestinian: I will kill you
• First Hamas fighters raped her. Then they shot her in the head
• ‘Who will protect us?’: Christina Lamb on the Yazidis’ dangerous journey home

Alex Crawford — Sky News

• Libya floods: Child’s voice heard under rubble as rescue teams search desperately in Derna for survivors
• Warning of Islamic State’s growing resurgence – as Sky News gets rare access to terrorists’ families
• Report from Lebanon

Kim Sengupta — The Independent

• Bombs, betrayal and burying loved ones: Plight of one Ukraine village illustrates toll of Russia’s invasion
• ‘I have buried more than 50 friends’: My life as a British soldier fighting on Ukraine’s bloody front line
• The families of hostages taken by Hamas are desperate – but can Israel get them back?

Vanessa Bowles, Jaber Badwan — Channel 4 Dispatches

• Kill Zone: Inside Gaza

Louise Callaghan — The Sunday Times

• The secret city of tunnels where hundreds live below Vegas glitz
• Claudia Sheinbaum: Meet the woman ready to be Mexico’s first presidenta
• Stand-off at Eagle Pass: welcome to the epicentre of the US border crisis

Secunder Kermani — Channel 4 News

• Palestinian detainees allege torture and sexual abuse by Israeli captors
• Myanmar military forces victims to fight in brutal civil war

Gesbeen Mohammad, Brad Manning, Nechirvan Mando, Ghoncheh Habibiazad, Esella Hawkey, Tom Giles, Hafez — ITV

• Inside Iran: The Fight for Freedom

Stuart Ramsay, Dominique van Heerden, Toby Nash — Sky News

• Haiti gang boss will take part in talks if invited – but warns foreign forces will be treated as ‘invaders’
• Aboard ‘The Beast’: What do migrants face travelling through Mexico on way to US?
• Shocking scenes in Gaza hospital as IDF moves into Khan Younis | Israel-Hamas war

Arkady Ostrovsky — 1843 magazine, The Economist

• Life and death in Putin’s gulag
• Death and destruction in a Russian city
• Life and fate (podcast)

Technology Journalism, sponsored by Amazon

Alexander Martin — The Record from Recorded Future News

• Ransomware attacks hit record level in UK, according to neglected official data
• UK government urged to get on ‘forward foot’ with ransomware instead of ‘absorbing the punches’
• Exclusive: UK to propose mandatory reporting for ransomware attacks and licensing regime for all payments

Marianna Spring — BBC News

• The real story of the news website accused of fuelling riots
• Trump supporters target black voters with faked AI images
• X takes action on deepfake network smearing UK politicians after BBC investigation

Joe Tidy — BBC World Service

• ‘Pig butchering’ scammers target BBC reporter
• Sextortion warning: In six hours, my son was dead
• Stolen test data and NHS numbers published by hospital hackers

Amanda Chicago Lewis — 1843 magazine, The Economist

• Secrets of a ransomware negotiator

Cathy Newman, Job Rabkin, Emily Roe, Sophie Braybrook, Guy Basnett, Ed Howker — Channel 4 News

• Deepfake Porn

Helen Lewis — BBC Radio 4/BBC Sounds

• Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat

Energy & Environment Journalism, sponsored by Renewable UK

Sam McBride — Belfast Telegraph

• Apocalypse Neagh: The source of 40% of NI’s water is ‘dying’
• Watch: Sam McBride’s in-depth look at Lough Neagh’s blue-green algae crisis

Josephine Moulds — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• Backroom deals, mystery companies and a ‘killer lake’: inside DRC’s gas and oil auction
• HSBC helped oil and gas industry raise $47bn despite net-zero pledge
• Barclays’ billions of ‘sustainable’ finance for fossil fuel industry is greenwash, says investor

Esme Stallard, Becky Dale, Sophie Woodcock, Jonah Fisher, Libby Rogers — BBC News

• Water firms illegally spilled sewage on dry days – data suggests
• BBC uncovers 6,000 possible illegal sewage spills in one year

Rachel Salvidge, Leana Hosea — The Guardian/Watershed

• The Watershed Pollution Map
• Landfills across England could be leaking harmful toxic ooze, warn experts
• ‘It’s a poison and it’s killing us’: the hidden dangers of old UK landfills

Guy Grandjean, Patrick Fee, Gwyneth Jones, Chris Thornton — BBC Spotlight Northern Ireland

• Spotlight – The Lough Neagh Monster
• Hundreds of environmental breaches by Moy Park

Sofia Quaglia — The Guardian

• ‘If we can’t fish any more, we’re going to die’: the volunteer sea patrols protecting precious Philippine waters
• From sea to plate … to sea! Hong Kong puts oyster shells to new use
• ‘It smells so bad’: glut of wild salmon creates stink in Norway and Finland

Jess Staufenberg — SourceMaterial

• Trojan Horsepower – Formula 1 and the Saudi oil lobby
• F1 lobbies for Saudi against EU green rules

Arts & Entertainment Journalism

Mark Daly, Mona McAlinden, Shelley Jofre, Jax Sinclair, Karen Wightman, Hayley Hassall — BBC Panorama

• The Dark Side of Ballet Schools

Jonathan Dean — The Times and The Sunday Times

• Oasis reunion and Wembley gigs next year … is that definitely, maybe?
• Ridley Scott: I didn’t need historians to make my Napoleon epic
• Olly Alexander on Eurovision: ‘I was trying not to have a breakdown’

Rachael Healy — The Guardian and Observer

• ‘At the start you get molested and by 45 you’re too old to work’ – the secret misery of women working in TV
• Fresh crisis at ‘toxic’ Strictly as ex-staff claim they faced sexualised comments and cruelty
• ‘The outrageousness of what Louis CK did is totally lost’: the film about the backlash faced by his accusers

Tom Bryant — Daily Mirror

• BBC’s Huw Edwards scandal teen breaks silence in first interview – ‘I felt groomed’
• Huw Edwards scandal teen: Why I first tried to protect BBC star but now feel shame
• Paul O’Grady’s beloved dog nuzzled star’s shoulder as devoted husband battled to save him

Lucy Osborne, Stephanie Kirchgaessner — The Guardian and Observer

• ‘I honest to God believe I was drugged’: magician David Copperfield’s alleged victims speak out
• The FBI investigated David Copperfield for two years. The claim that he was ‘exonerated’ was widely embraced. Was he?
• ‘Magic David called’: David Copperfield repeatedly contacted Jeffrey Epstein

Clemmie Moodie, Hannah Hope, Scarlet Howes — The Sun

• Strictly pro Giovanni Pernice probed over serious complaints by 3 ‘traumatised’ contestants as BBC ‘gathers evidence’
• Strictly Come Dancing bosses make huge changes to show after Giovanni Pernice quits
• Strictly bombshell as Amanda Abbington demands backstage footage of her and Giovanni as she is diagnosed with PTSD

Carolyn Atkinson, Olivia Skinner — BBC Radio 4 Front Row

• The British Museum’s missing gems
• Painting stolen in art heist more than 30 years ago returned to Glasgow museum

Rosamund Urwin, Charlotte Wace — The Times and The Sunday Times

• Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse
• How The Times and The Sunday Times investigated Russell Brand
• ‘I felt used and abused’ on Arthur: alleged Russell Brand victim speaks

New Journalist of the Year

Rafe Uddin — Financial Times

• Labour loses Muslim support over stance on Israel-Hamas ceasefire
• Reform UK’s unusual structure with Nigel Farage in the middle
• How Post Office lawyers pushed boundaries in UK sub-postmasters scandal

Sammy Gecsoyler — The Guardian

• ‘We’re going to see people dying on the streets’: homeless refugee crisis grips Liverpool
• ‘Rat bites and chronic asthma’: schools on frontline of UK housing crisis
• Met police agree six-figure payout to student hit by baton at protest

Kaf Okpattah — ITV News, ITV News London

• Whistleblower reveals corruption and collusion inside Wandsworth Prison
• The fraud scammers putting people out of pocket by cloning phone numbers

Simar Bajaj — The Guardian, New Scientist

• Everyone is on their phones. But is it really phone addiction we’re experiencing?
• The surprising mental health and brain benefits of weight-loss drugs
• He was shot in the throat. Now he saves gun victims as a trauma surgeon in Baltimore

Nimra Shahid — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

• Santander arranged billion-dollar oil bond after making green pledge
• Santander weakened fossil fuel policy after raising billions for gas projects

Venetia Menzies — The Sunday Times

• Anxiety drug pregabalin killed my son — and hundreds more are dying from it
• The company taking refugees out of Gaza — and ‘making millions’
• After the earthquake: how Morocco is rebuilding

Oliver Marsden — The Sunday Times/Al Jazeera

• Hero taxi driver who saved scores from Hamas faces hatred from both sides
• Dodging Israeli rockets with Ghana’s UN peacekeepers
• Israeli strikes on Lebanon: Attacks are causing wildfires across south

Yasmin Rufo — BBC News

• London mayor election: Bots, misleading URLs cause voter confusion
• Ulez expansion: Contested claims examined
• Ulez: More than 300 cameras damaged or stolen in four months

Sports Journalism

Jacob Whitehead — The Athletic

• Special report: Newcastle United sponsor Noon and shocking allegations of worker mistreatment
• Saudi Arabia investigates worker mistreatment allegations after The Athletic report on Newcastle sponsor Noon
• Special report: ‘Disturbing’ safety issues at Hillsborough 35 years after disaster

Oliver Brown — The Telegraph

• Angela Carini was sent unforgivably into harm’s way by gutless IOC cowards
• After my grandfather hugged Jesse Owens, the Nazis told him: ‘Never embrace a black man again’
• Michael Vaughan: If I had gone through this racism ordeal at 80, I would have wanted to be shot

Simon Lock, Rob Davies, Jacob Steinberg — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism / The Guardian

• Abramovich’s hidden football deals during Chelsea’s time at the top (TBIJ) and Chelsea FC face new questions over how Roman Abramovich funded success (Guardian)
• ‘I worked for Abramovich?’: footballers were owned by oligarch via offshore deals (TBIJ) and Revealed: Abramovich, the super-agent and the footballers owned as ‘commodities’ (Guardian)
• Leaked documents reveal Abramovich is still connected to Vitesse (TBIJ) and Abramovich loans fund owner of Dutch football club, leaked documents suggest (Guardian)

Jacob Judah — 1843 magazine, The Economist

• The strange case of the disappearing football team

Riath Al-Samarrai — Daily Mail

• Drifting through life without gold medals, tortured by his past, and now claims of bankruptcy… How did petulant Wiggins fall so spectacularly from his golden bike?
• Seb Coe explains why he’s HAPPY to break 128 years of Olympic tradition by handing out cash for gold… and reveals Roman Abramovich’s unlikely role in athletics
• The curious case of Jade Jones’ drugs test and why the Chinese might be quick to ask questions, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI

Ian Herbert — Daily Mail

• Looting and rioting, setting fire to police officers and hunting down English fans… fearful European clubs are turning a blind eye to shadowy leaders of their untouchable ultras
• Thirty-five years after horror of the Hillsborough tragedy, Mail Sport can reveal that incredibly the stadium is still not fit for purpose with poor stewarding, inadequate turnstiles and a problem tunnel
• Grubby, classless, the five-year legal battle over plane crash victim Emiliano Sala takes us into football’s sewers… where players are pawns and chronically inept clubs desperately try to save cash

Matt Lawton — The Times

• Man City launch unprecedented legal action against Premier League
• ‘The horror is everywhere’ – inside Lord Coe’s secret trip to Ukraine
• Russian athletes should be allowed at Olympics, says government

Um-E-Aymen Babar — Sky Sports

• How does endometriosis affect women in sport?
• USA cricket teen on tackling social media trolls, South Asian heritage and 2028 Olympic goals
• Um-E-Aymen Babar ok Tiktok

Campaign of the Year

Caroline Wheeler —The Sunday Times: Bloody Disgrace

• Thousands dead, 40 years of cover-up: time for justice for infected blood victims
• At last: promise of £10bn payout for infected blood victims
• Jeremy Hunt: I promised a dying friend I’d end infected blood scandal

Patrick Butler, Josh Halliday, John Domokos — The Guardian: Unpaid Carers

• Carers threatened with prosecution over minor breaches of UK benefit rules
• ‘Injustice’: 92-year-old with dementia told by DWP to repay £7k in disability allowance
• I’m under attack and fighting back: the scandal trapping carers

Computer Weekly editorial team — Computer Weekly: Post Office Scandal

• Post Office Horizon scandal explained: Everything you need to know
• Fujitsu staff instructed how to bid for government contracts during self-imposed ban
• Post Office Horizon replacement project labelled ‘unachievable’ as taxpayer bill reaches £1bn

David Cohen — Evening Standard: Show Respect

• Boys, porn and the alarming way they talk about girls – a special investigation
• School pupils tell how they are victims of sexual harassment every day
• Show some respect: Standard launches campaign with £500k to tackle sexist abuse in schools

Lucie Heath — i: Save Britain’s Rivers

• Save Britain’s Rivers: i challenges all parties to commit to election manifesto
• Revealed: The hidden sewage spills damaging our national parks and beauty spots
• National Trust signs up to i’s Save Britain’s Rivers manifesto

Hanna Geissler, Giles Sheldrick — Daily Express: Give Us Our Last Rights

• My assisted dying petition proves Brits are compassionate – now Rishi Sunak must act
• ‘I’m terminally ill – assisted dying must be legalised so my daughter won’t see me suffer’
• Assisted dying debate must move on to how law will change, MND campaigner says

Amy Clare Martin — The Independent: IPP Jail Sentences

• Revealed: 16 years in prison for stealing a bike and no hope of release – as 7 trapped in jail kill themselves
• ‘He looked like a starving dog on the floor’: Prisoner trapped on indefinite jail term driven to hunger strike
• Father imprisoned for 12 years for stealing mobile phone under ‘cruel’ indefinite jail term reunited with son

Martin Bagot, Jason Beattie — Daily Mirror: Save NHS Dentistry

• Dentists warn ‘rescue plan’ will fail to end crisis as 60,000 people sign our petition
• Day in the life of a dentist – and why it’s nothing like you imagine as NHS nears collapse
• Britain’s dental health crisis exposed as hundreds of children in hospital with bad teeth

Photojournalism

Thomas Dworzak — 1843 magazine, The Economist

André Luís Alves — 1843 magazine, The Economist

Giles Clarke — CNN Digital

Nichole Sobecki — 1843 magazine, The Economist

Dimitris Legakis — Athena Picture Agency

Stefan Rousseau — PA Media

Hannah McKay — Reuters

Interviewer of the Year

Alice Thomson — The Times

• Ed Davey: ‘Being a carer is harder than being a politician’
• Peter Kyle: It was 5am. A woman said, ‘Your partner is dead ’
• Emma Barnett: ‘The pain was so bad, I was losing the will to live’

Christina Lamb — The Sunday Times

• ICC prosecutor: UK didn’t blitz the IRA — Israel needs that restraint
• The president’s daughter (and Instagram star) wanted by Interpol
• David Cameron: ‘Why did I take the job? Rishi Sunak asked!’

Laura Kuenssberg — Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, BBC News

• Baroness Mone and the PPE Scandal
• How Can We Protect Our Children Online?
• Inside No 11 with Chancellor Rachel Reeves

Charlotte Edwardes — The Guardian

• ‘You asked me questions I’ve never asked myself’: Keir Starmer’s most personal interview yet
• ‘Dismissing global warming? That was a joke’: Jeremy Clarkson on fury, farming and why he’s a changed man
• ‘The levels of attack are extraordinary’: Gary Lineker on punditry, podcasts – and why he won’t stop speaking his mind

Nick Ferrari — LBC

• Labour leader Keir Starmer joins Nick Ferrari to take your calls
• Champagne and caviar: Esther Rantzen reveals plans for final moments as she pushes for assisted dying law change
• Nigel Farage joins Nick Ferrari

Samantha Poling — BBC

• How I confronted Emma Caldwell’s killer
• Catching a Killer: The Murder of Emma Caldwell
• Who Killed Emma?

Piers Morgan — Piers Morgan Uncensored

• “Richard Gadd is PSYCHOTIC” Baby Reindeer’s ‘Real’ Martha Fiona Harvey
• Kevin Spacey Breaks Down As He Faces Debt Of MILLIONS
• Piers Morgan vs Rishi Sunak Round 2 | Prime Minister Discusses Israel-Hamas War, NHS, Rwanda & More

Paul Brand — ITV News

• Interview with Rishi Sunak
• Interview with Ed Davey
• Interview with Keir Starmer

(View all three interviews here)

Politics Journalism

Jim Pickard, Anna Gross — Financial Times

• Keir Starmer accepted £76,000 of freebies including tickets to over 20 football games
• Keir Starmer faces backlash over early failure to disclose £16,200 in donor-funded clothing
• Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves declared clothing donations as office support

Pippa Crerar — The Guardian

• Kemi Badenoch accused of ‘bullying and traumatising’ staff
• Rishi Sunak aide placed bet on election date days before announcement
• Tories putting party reputation before sexual assault claim, says alleged victim

Rowena Mason, Henry Dyer, Matthew Weaver — The Guardian

• Biggest Tory donor said looking at Diane Abbott makes you ‘want to hate all black women’
• ‘No room for the Indians?’: Tory donor Frank Hester suggested staff climb on train roof
• Revealed: Sunak flown to Leeds for private tour of Frank Hester’s office weeks after £5m donation

Job Rabkin, Darshna Soni, Ed Gove, Saif Aledros, Georgina Lee, Lee Sorrell — Channel 4 News

• Undercover Inside Reform’s Campaign

Beth Rigby — Sky News

• Election exit poll
• The Battle for Number 10: A Sky News Leaders’ Special
• How Reform fares on Thursday will also determine the Conservatives fate

Caroline Wheeler — The Sunday Times

• Commons worker arrested after allegedly spying for China
• My MP husband Andrew Bridgen was captured by antivax ‘cult’
• At last: promise of £10bn payout for infected blood victims

Jane Merrick — i

• Thousands of disabled people died after ‘Covid treatment withheld’, inquiry to probe
• ‘My daughter was allowed to die of Covid because she had Down’s syndrome’
• Labour manifesto missing pensioners’ winter fuel and bus pass pledges

Steven Swinford — The Times

• Britain and US launch airstrikes on Houthi targets
• Jeremy Hunt looks for £9bn to balance his budget
• Teachers and nurses should get above-inflation pay rise, ministers told

Business, Finance and Economics Journalism, sponsored by Starling Bank

Simon Murphy — Daily Mirror & Sunday Mirror

• Fujitsu boss lives on ‘blood money’ with £2m mansion as we suffer, says Post Office victim
• Provider boasting of ‘compassion’ threatens daughter with court action over £50k care bill for her 93-year-old amputee mother with dementia
• Mirror tracks down former Post Office IT chief that Horizon inquiry insisted couldn’t be found

Ed Conway — Sky News

• Surge in sale of UK-made cars to Russia’s neighbours shows how it’s beating sanctions
• British firms’ exports are almost certainly bolstering Russia’s war machine in Ukraine, Sky data analysis finds
• How British financial services aid sale of Russian gas on European market | Ukraine War

Tom Bergin — Reuters

• Online-gambling giants conquer U.S. with tactics deemed too tough for Britain

Gill Plimmer, Robert Smith — Financial Times

• Chinese state banks are lenders to Thames Water’s parent company
• Thames Water owners pile group with debt
• Thames Water shareholders backed away over regulator’s debt demands

Siddharth Philip, Benedikt Kammel, Anthony Palazzo, Katharine Gemmell, Sabah Meddings — Bloomberg News

• Bogus Supplier of Jet-Engine Parts May Have Faked Employees Too
• Ghost in the Machine: How Fake Parts Infiltrated Airline Fleets
• UK Fraud Cops Make Arrest in Fake Airplane Parts Scandal

Anna Isaac, Alex Lawson — The Guardian

• Sellafield apologises after guilty plea over string of cybersecurity failings
• Nuclear Narnia: why is Sellafield Europe’s most dangerous industrial site?
• Sellafield nuclear site hacked by groups linked to Russia and China

Danny Fortson — The Sunday Times

• Mike Lynch: Flown to the US in chains, now he is free … and talking
• Inside Mike Lynch’s last stand as $11bn fraud trial looms
• The app that promised an NHS ‘revolution’ then went down in flames

Online Video Journalism

Alex Rothwell, Alastair Good, Yasmin Butt, Pauline Den Hartog Jager, Jack Feeney, Federica De Caria, Kasia Sobocinska, Stephanie Bosset — The Times and The Sunday Times

• Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse | Investigation
• Undercover in a British prison: security flaws exposed | Times Investigation
• ‘Illegal’ conspiracy theory school exposed | Times Investigation

Andrew Harding — BBC News

• BBC tracks down smuggler behind Channel crossing which killed Sara, 7

Mohamed Ibrahim, Owen Pinnel, Mouna Ba, Wael El-Saadi, Feras Al Ajrami — BBC Eye Investigations

• Gaza 101: Emergency Rescue

Tom Pettifor, Matthew Young, Daniel Dove — Daily Mirror

• Has the man who killed Jill Dando finally been found?
• Jill Dando murder: Man wanted for questioning matches features of Serbian assassin
• Jill Dando murder: Key witness identifies Serbian assassin

Lucinda Herbert, Iain Lynn — National World Video

• Lured To Her Death: The Murder of Sasha Marsden

Reem Makhoul, Robert Leslie, Clancy Morgan, Amelia Kosciulek, Matilda Hay, Liz Kraker, Dorian Barranco, Barbara Corbellini Duarte, Erica Berenstein, Yasser Abu Wazna — Business Insider

• 4 Gazans show how war devastated their coastline

Piers Morgan — Piers Morgan Uncensored

• “Richard Gadd is PSYCHOTIC” Baby Reindeer’s ‘Real’ Martha Fiona Harvey

Ben Marino, Joe Sinclair, Veronica Kan-Dapaah, Petros Gioumpasis, Greg Bobillot — Financial Times

• Chinese brokers launder hundreds of millions for global crime groups | FT Film

Investigation of the Year

Scarlet Howes, Mike Hamilton, Alex West — The Sun

• Ex-BBC presenter Huw Edwards charged with making 37 indecent images of children, ‘shared on WhatsApp’
• Huw Edwards used position of power to groom young people for 6 years even sending pictures from BBC desk to impress them
• We’re still suffering, say parents at centre of Huw Edwards scandal as they slam BBC for lack of answers after he quits

Rosamund Urwin, Charlotte Wace, Paul Morgan-Bentley, Esella Hawkey, Imogen Wynell Mayow, Alice McShane, Florence Kennard, Ian Bendelow, Victoria Noble, Alistair Jackson, Sarah Wilson, Geraldine McKelvie — The Sunday Times, The Times, Hardcash Productions, Channel Four Dispatches Investigations Unit

• Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse
• How The Times and The Sunday Times investigated Russell Brand
• Russell Brand: In Plain Sight

Alex Thomson, Nanette van der Laan — Channel 4 News

• Post Office Scandal

Paul Morgan-Bentley — The Times

• I worked undercover in one of UK’s most dangerous jails — without checks
• My son died in HMP Bedford. I never felt he was safe there
• Undercover in a British prison: security flaws exposed | Times Investigation

Ruth Evans, Oliver Newlan, Leo Telling, Sasha Hinde, Hayley Clarke, Karen Wightman — BBC Panorama

• Undercover School: Cruelty in the Classroom

Job Rabkin, Darshna Soni, Ed Gove, Saif Aledros, Georgina Lee, Lee Sorrell — Channel 4 News

• Undercover Inside Reform’s Campaign

Holly Bancroft, May Bulman, Monica C. Camacho, Fahim Abed — The Independent and Lighthouse Reports

• At last! Afghan special forces heroes set for sanctuary in UK after government U-turn
• MoD accused of burying admission that UK special forces had power over Afghan sanctuary claims
• Murdered, tortured or in hiding from the Taliban: The special forces abandoned by Britain

Daniel Hewitt, Imogen Barrer, Isabel Alderson-Blench, John Ray — ITV News: The Post Office Tapes

• New secret tape reveals top Post Office lawyer was warned of ‘wrongful’ convictions decade ago
• Secret tape shows Paula Vennells was told about problems with Horizon and warned not to cover it up
• Paula Vennells’ ‘smoking gun’ email reveals Post Office ‘cover-up’

Rowena Mason, Henry Dyer, Matthew Weaver — The Guardian

• Biggest Tory donor said looking at Diane Abbott makes you ‘want to hate all black women’
• No yawning or fingerprints on doors: the strict rules at Tory donor’s firm
• Revealed: Sunak flown to Leeds for private tour of Frank Hester’s office weeks after £5m donation

Samantha Poling, Eamon T. O Connor, Anton Ferrie, Shelley Jofre — BBC Disclosure

• Catching a Killer: The Murder of Emma Caldwell

Scoop of the Year

Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse — The Sunday Times, The Times, Hardcash Productions and Channel 4 Dispatches

Huw Edwards Huw Edwards charged with making 37 indecent images of children, ‘shared on WhatsApp’ — The Sun

Naked photos sent in WhatsApp ‘phishing’ attacks on UK MPs and staff— Politico

No 10 pass for Labour donor who gave £500,000 — The Sunday Times

Labour will add 20% VAT to private school fees within first year of winning power — i

The Nottingham Attacks: A Search for Answers — BBC Panorama

Innovation

Harry Lewis-Irlam, Stephen Matthews, Darren Boyle, Rhodri Morgan — Mail Online: Deep Dive

• Anatomy of a loveless landslide: How Labour won on apathy and division
• Hour by hour, how D-Day unfolded…
• How China could seize Taiwan and spark WW3

Laura Dunn, Katie Lilley-Harris, Ellie Senior, Sherree Younger, Scott Nicholson, Jamie Mckerrow Maxwell — KL Magazine

• Rocky Bottoms
• Johnny Cave’s Asparagus
• Archangel Distilleries

Niels de Hoog, Antonio Voce, Elena Morresi, Manisha Ganguly, Ashley Kirk — The Guardian

• How war destroyed Gaza’s neighbourhoods – visual investigation

Alison Killing, Chris Miller, Peter Andringa, Chris Campbell, Sam Learner, Sam Joiner — Financial Times

• FT investigation finds Ukrainian children on Russian adoption sites

David Dubas-Fisher, Cullen Willis, Paul Gallagher, Richard Ault — Reach Data Unit

• DWP Cold Weather Payment postcode checker – map shows where households are due £25, £50 or £75 boost
• Enter postcodes in this map to see average house prices in your area
• Cheapest places in Greater Manchester to buy petrol as RAC issues fuel price warning

Gabriel Pogrund, Emanuele Midolo, Venetia Menzies, Darren Burchett, Narottam Medhora, Cecilia Tombesi — The Sunday Times

• The dead teenager, the lying suspect and the black box that proves it

The post British Journalism Awards 2024: Full list of this year’s finalists appeared first on Press Gazette.

An Al Jazeera correspondent has argued efforts to enter the Gaza Strip by international journalists have not been enough.

Gaza correspondent Youmna El Sayed, who has been reporting from the strip since 7 October, made the comments at the Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit in London on Wednesday.

Youmna El Sayed said: “International journalists have not fought for the right to enter the Gaza strip and to cover the war.

“They have abandoned the right; they have for many years lectured about the freedom of speech that they have let go when covering the war in the Gaza strip.”

El Sayed added: “They [international media] have used the excuse of ‘lack of information’ or ‘not enough Western journalists entering the Gaza strip’ for not covering the war like they should.”

International journalists have been banned from entering Gaza by Israel unless supervised by the Israeli Defence Force.

In early February, nine press freedom organisations wrote to Prime Minister Sunak, urging the government to do more to protects journalists in Gaza.

Later that month, more than 55 foreign correspondents led by Sky News special correspondent Alex Crawford issued a plea to Israel and Egypt, requesting independent access to Gaza. Leaders of more than 30 international news organisations also published a similar letter.

Crawford told an event this month that a lack of apparent pressure from UK politicians to encourage Israel to allow foreign journalists into Gaza “seems really shocking and appalling and very hypocritical”.

In the first few months of the war, Crawford said, “I thought ‘maybe I’m not doing enough to get inside Gaza, maybe it’s just me that’s failing.’

“And then I realised that every single other foreign correspondent in the world is also, apparently, failing. And that cannot be possible – we’re all being blocked. And that is extremely alarming because we’re not getting the right picture.”

El Sayed, who was speaking alongside Al Jazeera Gaza producer colleague Safwat Kahlout, has worked in the strip for different international news outlets for the past eight years.

Referencing the death of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza City after she and her family apparently came under fire from Israeli tanks, El Sayed also said: “There is no excuse for those international journalists who have changed the terms and uses of words when they speak about certain incidents.

“When you call a six-year-old who was killed in her car a young woman, that is complete misconception.”

The post Al Jazeera Gaza correspondent accuses international journalists of not doing enough appeared first on Press Gazette.

CNN remains the most-followed English-language news publisher on Youtube, Press Gazette analysis has found.

But right-wing rival Fox News has knocked CNN off the top spot for all-time video views, pulling ahead by some 600 million streams. In our last ranking, in June 2022, Fox was behind CNN by 200 million.

In the past 16 months, seven publishers crossed the one million subscriber mark to enter Press Gazette’s ranking for the first time – including the accounts for opinion-led UK broadcaster GB News and global TalkTV programme Piers Morgan Uncensored.

Gannett-owned USA Today also stands out as a particularly rapid riser, jumping from the 29th most-followed publisher in Press Gazette’s 2022 list to 16th this year.

If you know of an English-language news publisher that has more than one million subscribers on Youtube but does not appear below, let us know at pged@pressgazette.co.uk.

[From June 2022: The biggest English-language news outlets on Youtube and their most popular videos]

The most-followed and most-watched news publishers on Youtube in October 2023

CNN remains the most-followed publisher in Press Gazette’s ranking, boosting its subscriber figures by 12% between June 2022 and October 2023 to 15.7 million. It is followed by the US broadcaster ABC News, which holds second place after growing its subscribers by 15% to 15.2 million.

BBC News also remains static at third place, but has grown faster than CNN and ABC News, boosting subscribers by 21% to 15.1 million.

The major change high up in the ranking comes from Al Jazeera English, which has jumped two spots to fourth place, passing Vox and Fox News.

Although CNN is first for subscribers, it has been overtaken by Fox News as the most-watched publisher on Youtube. Fox saw a 33% increase in its overall view count in the 16 months between June 2022 and October 2023, and now boasts more than 15 billion views for its main Youtube channel. CNN saw growth of 25% over the same period.

Most of the top-ten most-watched Youtube news publishers have maintained the same rank as last year. The highest-ranked exception is Insider (4.9 billion views as of October), which has fallen one spot to seventh as NBC News grew its views by more than 55% to 6.3 billion.

New entrants: Piers Morgan Uncensored and GB News pass 1m subscribers

There are 11 new additions to Press Gazette's ranking in 2023, seven of which passed the one million subscriber mark since the last analysis in June 2022. The remaining four appear to have already had one million subscribers, but were missed in last year's analysis.

The seven newly-qualifying entrants, which passed the one million subscriber mark, are:

• Australia's 9 News
• BBC News Africa
• CBN News, the news service of the Pat Robertson-founded Christian Broadcasting Network
• Canadian network CTV News
• New York local broadcaster Eyewitness News ABC7NY
• Opinion-led UK broadcaster GB News
• Piers Morgan Uncensored, the flagship programme for UK opinion-led broadcaster TalkTV which also airs in the US and Australia.

The other four added to our list are Indian news agency ANI News, English-language Chinese state broadcaster CGTN, Turkish public broadcaster TRT World and DW Documentary, the longform arm of German news agency Deutsche Welle.

GB News passed one million subscribers in September and hit one billion views last week.

The outlet's chief digital officer Geoff Marsh said: "This is astounding growth at record speed and proves GB News is cutting through to the people of the UK – the numbers don’t lie.”

GB News, which launched on TV in June 2021 while its Youtube channel was created four months earlier, claimed in a statement that the figures meant it has become "officially the fastest-growing British news provider ever" on Youtube.

However the account for TalkTV's Piers Morgan Uncensored has put on 800,000 more followers than GB News. Morgan's Youtube channel was created in November 2021 and TalkTV went live in April 2022.

Vox still top for most views per video

Although it has dropped a few spots on the most-subscribed list, Vox remains well ahead of the competition in terms of how many views each of its videos get.

Mona Lalwani, editorial director of Vox's video arm, told Press Gazette last year that much of its success came from its approach to explanatory journalism: "The way that news comes at us is hard and fast and splintered. And I think Vox does a really good job of gluing that information together."

The next-closest publisher for average views, the newly-included DW Documentary, attracted a mean of 756,000 viewers for each of its videos, compared with 2.08 million for Vox.

[Read more: How Vox became world’s top news publisher on Youtube]

USA Today jumps up rankings; Sun, Daily Mail and Telegraph also see big gains

One publisher is first when it comes to both most audience growth and most growth in cumulative views: Gannett-owned USA Today saw a 158.7% increase in its overall Youtube view count between June 2022 and October 2023.

It now has 3.1 billion views, putting it between Vice News (also 3.1 billion) and The Guardian (2.8 billion) in the ranking.

Also seeing substantial views growth were Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia (up 89.3%), The Sun (85.3%), the UK's Telegraph (61.7%) and the UK's Sky News (61.3%).

On subscriber growth, USA Today rose by 135% to just under five million. It now ranks 16th, behind The Telegraph - itself the second fastest growing publisher for subscribers, up 70% on June 2022.

The post Biggest news publishers on Youtube: GB News and Piers Morgan Uncensored pass 1m subscribers appeared first on Press Gazette.

As a journalist, I had covered the Vietnam War for years and watched as the United States and its few allies stumbled into a foreign quagmire. They could only remove this burden after considerable expenditure of blood and treasure and by abandoning policy objectives. Something similar was about to unfold.

In March 2003, President George W. Bush was hellbent on overthrowing his enemy President Saddam Hussein. I was ensconced in the 18-storey Palestine Hotel opposite Saddam’s palaces across the Tigris River. It had become an unofficial press headquarters and I was told by management that more than 100 journalists had checked in. The Bush White House called on Western journalists to leave the country “for your own safety”.

A similar warning from Bush’s father, then-President George H. Bush, had been directed to reporters who intended to cover the heavy bombing of Baghdad planned for the beginning of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. I stayed, of course, just as I had the previous time when I had conducted the famous, or infamous, interview with Saddam for CNN. I had interviewed him ten days into the first Gulf War in 1991 Desert Storm and was impressed with his military bearing and confident manner.

This time, things were different in several ways. Unlike in 1991, most journalists at the Palestine Hotel opted to remain in Baghdad despite the hotel’s close proximity to Saddam’s palaces which were believed to be the primary target for Bush’s bombs and missiles. Under an arrangement with my production company, I agreed to have my camera crew cover the story for NBC Television news.

NBC News secretly set up local contacts in two buildings near the palaces, ready to provide 24-hour live coverage when the war began and with two cameras in our office suite in the Palestine Hotel, I also had a clear view of the main palace several hundred yards across the Tigris River.

On March 20 at 5:34am, Baghdad time, the military invasion of Iraq began.

I was in my hotel bedroom as NBC anchor Tom Brokaw chatted with me, live, over the audio line. Suddenly, I heard approaching aircraft and the buzz of cruise missiles. My senior cameraman was aiming through the open window when the main palace exploded in a cauldron of bulging, boiling flames.

Kneeling beside my cameraman, the blast pushed me back across the room. I crawled on my belly over to him. He grinned. “Good pictures, huh,” he said. As I peered over the window-sill that was being battered by shrapnel from the bomb blasts, I began counting off the targets for Brokaw’s NBC News audience: Saddam’s palace, his son Uday’s palace, Ba’ath Party Headquarters, Military headquarters. It was ‘Shock and Awe’ indeed.

Several days into the invasion American forces were nowhere near Baghdad and we were able to continue broadcasting, alongside several other television stations, from the roof of the hotel.

Eleven days since the war started, a team from Iraqi State Television asked me for my view of how the war was going. I obliged – unfortunately.

At first, I had tried to resist giving an interview to Iraqi TV. When they asked, I told an assistant to Information Minister Mohammed al-Sahaf that I was forbidden to give interviews to government-run news organisations.

He responded: “But we know you have been giving such interviews to visiting crews and television companies run by the governments of Greece, Nationalist China, Jordan, Denmark and Arab states.”

Yes, I told him, but those countries were not enemies of the United States.

He countered: “We invited you here to cover our war. We’ve allowed you and your team great freedom to broadcast around the clock without interference. And we’ve protected you and made it possible to visit contested areas of the city. You say we’re your enemy?

“All true”, I admitted: “Where’s the interview room?”

The setting was a room off the hotel lobby. A well-groomed anchor. Portraits of Saddam on the walls.

I told my interviewer essentially what I had been saying to my NBC audiences, that Saddam’s initial strategy was to mass his conventional forces to slow down a much more powerful attacker, and then relying on his trained insurgents to inflict punishment when coalition forces neared Baghdad. That was happening. I said that the reports of increasing civilian casualties were aiding antiwar supporters in America. I also agreed that our treatment by the Iraqi government since our arrival to report the war had been excellent. I left the interview room wondering who in the world would be watching Iraqi satellite TV.

Well, the AP Cairo bureau was watching. My remarks were transcribed and then sent on the AP’s news services to subscribers around the world.

My remarks led to fury in USA. After all, it was argued, here was a correspondent for American television giving some sort of encouragement to the Iraqi narrative that they were bravely and effectively resisting the invasion. I must say NBC initially kept its cool. The news president, Neal Shapiro, issued a statement that basically said that Arnett was not a regular staffer, but even so NBC did not find anything in the Iraqi interview that required their intervention. Later that day Shapiro phoned me personally to explain: “Fox News has been on your story all day, demanding we fire you. And our affiliates are getting worried. So, I appreciate your work, but we have to let you go.”

So I had been sacked by NBC News – which was rather ironic, since in fact I was not contracted to NBC at all, and NBC was piggy-backing on National Geographic.

National Geographic issued a complaining statement that they had not approved the interview, and ended my agreement with them, neglecting to explain how we happened to be working in the NBC bureau in the first place.

The most cutting criticism came from my old friend and mentor Walter Cronkite whom I had known for 40 years and worked with on issues involving journalist safety and hostage rescue.

He suggested in a column that I was losing my journalistic integrity. I was sorry for my young National Geographic colleagues – three young men and a woman editor – who had been willing to cover a dangerous war zone that their experienced professional colleagues had fled from. They would never get credit for it.

I asked NBC for permission to sign off on the next Today Show and they approved. Matt Lauer was the anchor and he asked me: “Peter, how did this happen? How could you explain it? Too complicated. I apologised that my mistaken judgement had embarrassed the network and probably upset the millions of viewers who had been watching my around-clock coverage of the war for the previous ten days. I thanked Matt Lauer and departed NBC.”

Fortunately, I had another option. Paul Martin, who ran World News & Features, had already contracted me to an Australian independent radio network and he phoned me from Qatar, where he was covering the war. I told him I was downhearted and was planning to leave Baghdad through the desert to the west. No, he said, I’ll find you a good reason to stay. Within hours the Mirror Group of newspapers, which was opposed to the invasion, agreed to sign me up via WNF. The next morning came the famous front-page banner: “Fired by America for telling the truth. Hired by Daily Mirror to carry on telling it.”

I’m very grateful to Piers Morgan, the Mirror editor at the time. I had been handed a journalistic life jacket. So I stayed on, which was one of the best decisions in my career. Inundated with a flood of requests for interviews from television stations and newspapers worldwide, I asked Paul Martin to turn down most of them on my behalf.

My Mirror coverage focused on the increasing dangers in Baghdad for Iraqi citizens and the visiting media as American forces closed in on the airport and outer suburbs.

The Bush Administration was making it publicly clear that it was making the capture of President Saddam Hussein a priority and we were seeing bombings and cruise missile strikes hit ordinary houses in the city where intelligence sources had suggested Saddam was located. Rumours swept the press corps that Saddam himself was leading some of the desperate insurgent attacks against patrolling American armoured vehicles.

The visiting foreign press corps had survived the massive early bombing of Baghdad and as April arrived was able to move fairly freely around the city as a few shops and markets were opening and I visited crowded hospitals. But all that changed on what became our alarming “black Tuesday” on April 8, 2003.

In full view of dozens of journalists watching from their rooms on the upper floors of the Palestine Hotel, US bombers attacked the Baghdad bureau of Al Jazeera, the Qatar satellite TV station bureau just across the Tigris River. Very clear signs reading “Press” covered the building from all sides and on the roof. The office had informed the coalition of its exact coordinates as fighting erupted in the vicinity. Yet a correspondent was killed in the bombing and another wounded. A US Central Command spokesman said that the TV station “was not and has never been a target” even as the US Government had repeatedly criticized Al Jazeera as “endangering the lives of American troops.”

As a further shock on the same day, I watched as a US tank slowly moved across the nearest bridge over the Tigris, stopped and fired a high explosive shell that slammed into a corner room of the Palestine Hotel along the corridor near mine. I reached the room along with many others and found two journalists dead amidst the rubble, Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Couso of the Spanish network Telecinco. Three other correspondents were wounded.

The US military said the tank commander had mistaken the hotel for another building suspected of harbouring a suspected Iraqi forward artillery observer. The Committee to Protect Journalists later concluded that the attack on the journalists was “not deliberate, but avoidable.”

I personally did not for a moment believe the US military would deliberately target journalists. Even so for me and the 100 other journalists staying at the Palestine Hotel, it reinforced our fears that our lives were still on the line. A Reuters staffer lit a row of candles in the lobby as a memorial, the most we could do at that time.

Baghdad fell to the US military coalition on April 9, 2003, 20 days after the war started. My sense is that the US military had six months to prove to the many Iraqis who welcomed them as liberators that they had not come to stay indefinitely as occupiers. Yet mistakes were quickly made. While Saddam’s conventional military forces were totally routed, insurgents for several days challenged US force supremacy in the capital, and in other cities.

The coalition victory opened up to public scrutiny a cruel regime that had for 24 years concealed its terrible crimes against the population behind fences and secret prisons. In the cellar of the modern multi-story Olympic building in Baghdad where Saddam’s eldest son and brutal heir apparent, Uday Hussein ran his business empire, I saw instruments of medieval-style torture including iron masks of various shapes and sizes and steel instruments that could inflict pain. In the garden was a windowless concrete structure that was said to be Uday’s private prison.

There was worse. The security forces and wardens running the most notorious prison in the country at Abu Ghraib, a small town north of Baghdad, fled in the last days of the war and the many mainly political prisoners held there for years were released. I visited the prison soon afterwards and saw the bloodstained floors of the punishment cells and the interrogation rooms where steel torture instruments were in neat racks along concrete walls. We were guided by a former prisoner who showed us a small room with a hangman’s rope hanging from the ceiling over a square, deep opening carved into the floor. Images of Saddam were posted on banners along corridors and painted in some prison cells.

On the grounds outside I saw a score or more of Iraqi women, some weeping, others with piles of human bones beside them, digging into the soil seeking the remains of family members and relatives believed to have been murdered in the prison and unceremoniously buried in the grounds.

The victorious coalition initially announced it was closing Abu Ghraib permanently, and then, in a Machiavellian decision, reopened the prison under US Army and CIA management committing a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees, including physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape and the killing of Manadel al Jamadi. Revealed in April 2004 by CBS News, the incidents caused shock and outrage and were widely condemned within the United States and Internationally.

As a journalist who has covered many wars I was convinced, and remain convinced, that the military invasion of Iraq by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland in 2003 was a political blunder of immense proportions. It was made worse by ill-planning, fabricated intelligence and erroneous assumptions by the western leaders who persuaded themselves that an intervention would stabilise the Middle East.

In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) launched a military offensive in northern Iraq and declared a worldwide Islamic caliphate. The Iraq war and its aftermath had changed the balance of power in the region in favour of the United States’ major adversary in the region, Iran.

And this has also affected the way the West has dealt with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But that, as we say, is another story.

Copyright Peter Arnett/Paul Martin / Correspondent.World

Contact@correspondent.World

The post Fired by NBC, hired by Piers Morgan: Peter Arnett on covering fall of Baghdad 20 years on appeared first on Press Gazette.

It’s not just tube drivers, airline workers and lawyers who are discontented with pay and conditions this year as the cost of living crisis bites.

Journalists at numerous UK and US publishers are making their voices heard through their unions as well.

So far in the UK, National Union of Journalists members at Reach and National World-owned titles in Scotland have voted for industrial action over pay and redundancies respectively, although National World subsequently called their strike off. More than 1,000 Reach journalists went on strike for one day, on 31 August, and have now accepted a revised pay offer.

Al Jazeera staff were the latest to have balloted for strike action, with dates initially set for November before management agreed a new pay deal.

And there is ongoing unease at the BBC over plans to merge the two 24-hour news channels.

In the US, journalists at Gannett, Wired and Reuters have been among those vocal at expressing their discontent this year.

We will keep this page updated with developments relating to pay offers and industrial action across the industry. If something is going on at your company you feel we should know about, please get in touch at pged@pressgazette.co.uk.

Gannett journalists strike for one day

4/11/22: More than 200 Gannett journalists in the US are staging a one-day strike today.

The strikers work at 14 local Gannett newsrooms in states including New York, New Jersey, Arizona and Southern California.

Hundreds of other Gannett journalists at newsrooms in the likes of Austin, Florida, Ohio, Milwaukee will stage a lunchtime walkout or staging pickets in solidarity with their colleagues, according to the News Guild union.

News Guild said it was the biggest coordinated action at Gannett since it laid off 400 staff, 3% of the workforce, in August and announced further cost-cutting measures in October. On Thursday it published its Q3 earnings report, revealing details of its fourth consecutive loss-making quarter with operating revenue down 10% year-on-year.

The union said the company’s “austerity measures… are devastating local news around the country”.

News Guild president Jon Schleuss said: “Gannett is actively sabotaging our democracy by attacking its own journalists. The company has the money to invest in journalists and it should start doing that immediately instead of fighting them.”

Al Jazeera averts strike with new pay deal

1/11/22: Al Jazeera English has averted two strike days in November by its UK-based journalists after offering a new pay deal that was accepted by the NUJ.

Management proposed a 4.5% pay rise for this year and a further 4.5% increase in 2023.

The NUJ’s national broadcasting organiser Paul Siegert said: “It is a shame it took the threat of industrial action to bring about this settlement but nevertheless we welcome the company’s decision…”

Al Jazeera journalists vote to strike

24/10/22: NUJ members at Al Jazeera have voted to strike over pay and are expected to walk out on 4 and 20 November.

The group chapel revealed that, on an 80% turnout, 96.97% of those who voted backed strike action while 100% called for action short of a strike.

The Al Jazeera group chapel previously rejected the company’s offer of a 4.5% pay rise plus an unconsolidated £500 for staff earning less than £50,000. It said this was a “dismal offer against a background of colossal spending elsewhere in the company”.

The NUJ asked for either a higher deal for this year, or a two-year deal of 4.5% this year and 4.5% in 2023, because of the high rate of inflation.

Reach journalists accept revised pay offer

23/9/22: Journalists at Reach have narrowly voted to accept a pay offer from the company after months of dispute and a one-day strike.

Some 1,150 national and regional journalists across the UK and Ireland went on strike for 24 hours on 31 August after turning down a 3% pay offer.

Just over a week later the NUJ agreed to take a new pay proposal from the company to its members in a consultative ballot.

Results revealed on Friday showed that 55% of members who voted accepted the offer and 45% voted against.

A total of 906 valid votes were received of 1,185 ballots issued, meaning turnout of 76.5% across NUJ members at the publisher.

A Reach spokesperson said: “After much hard work and open communication on all sides, the NUJ have accepted Reach’s latest proposal which, in addition to a proposed annual increase and a host of other important commitments, will increase pay for over 700 journalists.

“We are pleased that we have been able to work together to find a way forward and will continue to keep an open dialogue on these crucial issues in the months to come.”

According to the NUJ, the new deal will deliver “significant pay rises to over 700 journalists, many of whom are the lowest paid staff, and improved redundancy terms and conditions for many members in currently in receipt of statutory minimums.

“Including increases secured in July, it will see pay rise for these workers in deals ranging from 14 to 44 per cent across the specified roles and minimum rates.”

Al Jazeera journalists to vote on strike action

23/9/22: NUJ is balloting its members at Al Jazeera over whether they want to take strike action or action short of a strike in a row about pay.

The group chapel has rejected the company’s offer of 4.5% plus an unconsolidated £500 for staff earning less than £50,000.

The NUJ said that pay deal was “unreasonable” because inflation is at 10% and expected to remain high in 2023. It asked for either a higher deal for this year, or a two-year deal of 4.5% this year and 4.5% in 2023.

The new ballot will close on 17 October.

NUJ senior organiser Paul Siegert said: “We hope management will meet with us urgently with a pay offer that can avoid members taking industrial action.”

Three-day Reach strike postponed amid new ballot

12/9/22: A three-day strike by Reach journalists across the UK and Ireland due to be held between 14 to 16 September has been put on hold amid new negotiations between the company and the NUJ.

The NUJ has also ended a “work to rule” period at the publisher until after, if it is still needed, the funeral of The Queen on 19 September.

A ballot of staff asking whether they would like to accept a proposal on pay offered by Reach will open on 14 September and end at 12pm on 23 September.

A Reach spokesperson said: “We have been working on a number of proposals to resolve this dispute and can share that the NUJ have agreed to take a proposal to their members for ballot.

“This is a significant step and we are hopeful for a resolution.”

Al Jazeera staff to ballot over pay

7/9/22: Al Jazeera journalists are preparing to ballot for industrial action over pay after talks with management at conciliation service ACAS fell through on Wednesday.

“A recent informal ballot showed 85.29% of members are willing to take strike action over pay,” the broadcaster’s NUJ chapel tweeted. Broadcast technical staff union BECTU was also involved in the failed talks.

1,150 Reach journalists on picket lines across UK and Ireland over 3% pay offer

31/8/22: Picket lines were held by Reach journalists in London’s Canary Wharf, Glasgow, Cardiff, Newcastle, Oldham, Liverpool, Hull, Birmingham, Bristol, Belfast and Dublin on Wednesday 31 August in the first day of their strike in protest at a 3% pay offer.

See pictures from across the country here.

Reach strike back on after last-ditch pay talks fail

30/8/22: A staff strike at Reach is back on after last-ditch pay talks between the company and the NUJ broke down over the weekend.

A proposed strike day on Friday had been postponed after the company proposed last-minute negotiations through the pay dispute arbitrator ACAS.

Hundreds of journalists will now strike for one more day than previously planned, on Wednesday 31 August and for three days in a row from Tuesday 13 September to Thursday 15 September.

They will also take part in an extended “work to rule” (meaning working only contracted hours and duties) from Thursday after Wednesday’s strike ends, and on an ongoing basis from Friday 16 September.

The NUJ said its reps had passed a unanimous vote of no confidence in Reach chief executive Jim Mullen as a result as general secretary Michelle Stanistreet claimed he “kiboshed any chance of a sensible deal that addresses our members’ key priority – their consolidated pay”. NUJ members voted to reject a 3% pay offer from the company.

A Reach spokesperson said the company had offered a new career framework with clear salary progressions for journalists as part of the talks.

They said: “Over the weekend we have been in discussions with the NUJ in hope of avoiding industrial action, but unfortunately these talks have ended without agreement.

“We were able to meet the majority of requirements put forward by the NUJ and proposed an accelerated career development framework that would have set out clearer salary progression for journalists, so we are disappointed that our offer was rejected.”

Read the full story here.

NUJ calls off Scotsman strike dates

18/8/22: The NUJ has called off the strike dates it had planned at The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and Edinburgh Evening News for 26 August and 2 September.

Although two NUJ members at the titles have been made compulsorily redundant as part of a digital-first restructure, the union said they did not want it to pursue industrial action on their behalf.

“However, there are issues arising from the jobs losses, and we have approached the company for an urgent meeting to discuss these in detail,” NUJ national organiser for Scotland John Toner said.

Read the full story here.

BBC journalists mull strike action over channel cuts

16/8/22: Journalists at the BBC are being consulted over potential strike action in response to plans to merge the TV channels BBC News and World News, according to The Times.

Staff were told last month that the move could see 70 roles cut in its London hub, with 20 new jobs created in Washington DC. The current roster of 19 BBC News anchors in London could be cut to five, it has been reported.

In response the NUJ has started a consultative ballot with journalists to gauge whether they would support a walkout. If a majority back the idea, this could be used in negotiations with bosses before any further or more formal steps towards a strike are taken.

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Regional publishers JPI Media, Archant and Midland News Association topped furlough claims for the UK news media industry in January.

Each publisher claimed between £100,001 and £250,000 from the Government’s job retention scheme in January, when the UK went back into lockdown amid a surge of Covid-19 cases and deaths.

Archant and MNA had upped their furlough payments from between £50,001 and £100,000 in December. JPI was already in the higher band at the end of the year.

As a whole, the news industry claimed somewhere between £535,018.25 and £1.525m in January.

[Read more: Media furlough claims in December, February and March]

In December it claimed between £390,000 and £1.18m. No exact figures are given in the public Government data – only banded ranges.

City AM was the only media company that reduced the size of its claim to the extent it fell into another band – from claiming between £25,000 and £50,000 in December to somewhere between £10,001 and £25,000.

The business title, which has now been digital-only for a year and hopes to return in print before the autumn, made nine redundancies in editorial during October.

See below for a full list of UK media companies that used the furlough job retention scheme in January

There were just two media companies that were not using the furlough scheme in December but did so in January: broadcaster Al Jazeera and slow news start-up Tortoise Media, both claiming amounts up to £10,000.

A number of other companies increased their claims in January, potentially because of the extra lockdown restrictions: regional publishers Tindle Devon Newspapers and Southwark News, magazine publisher Time Out and LBC owner Global Radio.

The Guardian continued to be the only national newspaper publisher with staff on furlough, in the £50,001 to £100,000 band.

Some others used the scheme earlier in the pandemic, including the UK’s largest commercial publisher Reach, and the Telegraph which returned the payments it had received after strong subscriptions growth helped it stay in profit.

HMRC has only been able to reveal which companies are making use of the furlough scheme since December, even though it went live in March last year, because of taxpayer confidentiality rules under the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005.

A Treasury direction made under the Coronavirus Act 2020 in November corrected this and now requires HMRC to name on a monthly basis the employers who have claimed cash and how much.

See below for a full list of UK media companies that used the job retention scheme in January, with claim total given in £.

National press

Regional press

Broadcast media

Digital media

Magazines

B2B

Specialist news

Picture: Shutterstock

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A journalist was told he would be made “the new Jamal Khashoggi” while others had photos on their phones stolen and posted on the internet in a suspected blackmail attempt after a TV station was hacked.

Al-Jazeera documentary filmmaker Tamer Almisshal and 36 others were targeted with spyware believed to have been sent by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The television station is based in rival Qatar which has been subjected to a regional boycott for more than three years, with demands that Al Jazeera is closed down.

iPhones belonging to the staff, including TV anchors and executives, is believed to have been targeted using spyware developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group.

It was used by Saudi Arabia to track the movements of Khashoggi by infecting one of his close associates in Canada, called Omar Abdulaziz.

When told by Abdulaziz that he had been the victim of a hack the former Washington Post journalist replied: “God help us”.

Khashoggi was murdered and his body dismembered when he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up some paperwork in October 2018.

The software, known as Pegasus, is able to track location, access passwords, listen to conversations and even take pictures via the phone’s camera.

Almisshal raised the alarm after death threats were left on a device he used to call ministries in the UAE for a story in July.

Unlike previous Pegasus attacks where phone users would have to click on a link sent over iMessage, researchers at Citizen Lab in Toronto discovered this time software called Kismet was used whereby victims would not have do anything, in what is called a “zero-click” attack.

Almishal said: “They threatened to make me the new Jamal Khashoggi. This hacking was done by so-called zero-click technique where they can access cameras and track the device. They also found operators in the UAE and Saudi Arabia were behind this hacking.

“We tracked the spyware for six months and found that at least 36 Al Jazeera staffers were hacked. They have used some of the content they stole from the phones to blackmail journalists by posting private photos on the internet.”

Citizen Lab linked the attacks ‘with medium confidence’ to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, based on their previous targeting of dissidents with the spyware.

A spokesman said: “We believe that (at a minimum) this version of the Pegasus spyware has the ability to track location, access passwords and stored credentials on the phone, record audio from the microphone including both ambient ‘hot mic’ recording and audio of encrypted calls, and take pictures via the phone’s camera.”

Apple said it was working to improve security of its devices and urged customers to download the latest version of the software to protect themselves and their data.

NSO Group claimed its products are for tackling “serious organised crime and counter-terrorism” and said it would investigate any breaches of its policies.

A spokesman added: “As we have repeatedly stated we do not have access to any information with respect to the identities of individuals our system is used to conduct surveillance on.”

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The head of news giant Al Jazeera has made a renewed plea for the release of journalist Mahmoud Hussein who, as of 23 October, has been locked up in an Egyptian prison for 1,400 days.

Mostefa Souag, the acting director general of Al Jazeera Media Network, is calling on “the international community to pressure Egypt” into releasing Hussein and other journalists from jail.

On the 1,400th day of Hussein’s “arbitrary and illegal detention”, Souag said: “Mahmoud’s detention, which is in grave violation of both Egyptian and international law, is deplorable. It must come to an end.

“With the high risk of transmission of Covid-19 in crowded prison conditions, we call upon the Egyptian Authority to free all detained journalists and urge the international community to pressure Egypt and all governments to reaffirm the values of press freedom.”

Hussein, an Egyptian national who worked for Al Jazeera in Qatar, was arrested on 23 December 2016 while on holiday with his family.

In a press release, Al Jazeera described Egypt as one of the world’s “leading violators of press freedom,” adding that “even under Egyptian law it is supposedly illegal to hold an individual without charge for more than two years”.

It said the authorities had “eluded” this law by releasing Hussein after two years only to re-arrest him “on an additional fictitious charge”.

Reporters Without Borders labels Egypt as one of the worst countries in the world for press freedom. It ranked 166th out of 180 in its 2020 index, behind the likes of Afghanistan (122), Russia (149), Kazakhstan (157) and Iraq (162).

Hussein’s employer said in a statement: “Al Jazeera condemns the unlawful detention and refutes all charges against Mahmoud, and calls on the international community, media professionals, and human rights advocates to raise awareness and demand the immediate release of Mahmoud Hussein and all other journalists imprisoned around the world.

“At Al Jazeera we stand in solidarity with all our colleagues in the media. We demand that no journalist should be intimidated, persecuted or imprisoned for carrying out their duty; journalism is not a crime.”

Earlier this week, hundreds of European and US politicians, as well as organisations including Amnesty International, sent letters to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi denouncing the detention of “prisoners of conscience” in the country. Hussein was among the prisoners listed, alongside several other journalists, human rights lawyers and human rights researchers.

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A former journalist jailed in Egypt during protests which erupted in 2013 has dropped a multi-million pound claim against Al Jazeera.

Mohamed Fahmy, 45, had issued a £60m lawsuit blaming the Qatari network for knowingly endangering his life.

He used the publicity surrounding his detention and court appearances to attack Al Jazeera and the Doha regime for the alleged negligence.

It later emerged that he had been paid nearly £200,000 by the United Arab Emirates to fund the legal action.

The UAE is a regional enemy of Qatar and a close ally of Egypt’s Sisi government, with whom it entered into a blockade of Doha in June 2017, along with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Sisi came to power in 2014 following a military coup which overthrew the elected government of Mohamed Morsi whose Muslim Brotherhood party had been backed by Qatar.

Bureau chief Fahmy was one of three Al Jazeera journalists jailed in Cairo (pictured) in December 2013 on charges of “false news” and spent more than 400 days in prison.

The other two were Australian Peter Greste and Egyptian Baher Mohamed.

They were convicted of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the authorities had declared a terrorist organisation, and of broadcasting falsified footage aimed at damaging national security.

Their convictions were overturned on appeal and it was ruled their rights had been violated.

Fahmy’s support from UAE was revealed when the New York Times obtained his correspondence with the country’s Ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, whose emails had been hacked.

Despite the revelations he continued to attack Qatar during public appearances, most notably at a Qatar opposition conference in London in October 2017.

However, he dropped the case when it emerged that he would be cross examined in court if he went ahead with the legal action against the Al Jazeera network in Canada.

A spokesman for Al Jazeera said: “Al Jazeera is committed to reporting the news without fear or favour and will always stand up for its journalists and the rights of all journalists to operate freely anywhere in the world without fear of arbitrary arrest, assault, prosecution or other forms of harassment and intimidation.

“Al Jazeera worked extremely hard to support Mr Fahmy and his colleagues after their arrest and throughout their trial and imprisonment in Egypt and was extremely disappointed when Mr Fahmy sought to transfer blame for the oppressive and unlawful actions of the Egyptian authorities onto the Network.

“That it is now clear that he did this in collaboration with a regime that is fundamentally opposed to free and independent journalism only heightens our sense of disappointment.”

Fahmy told Press Gazette he was forced to drop the case for financial reasons.

“There is nothing more I wanted than to see than Al Jazeera on trial and I had worked for years preparing a huge file including affidavits to support my case which included testimonies from former Al Jazeera employees, academics, lawyers, and professionals like Dr Najeeb Al Nuaimi, the former Qatari minister of justice who was banned from leaving Qatar shortly after my email was hacked and it became public that he had written an affidavit submitted toward my case,” he said.

“I dropped the litigation purely for financial reasons after my lawyer who was working on contingency informed me months before the cross-examination that he could not sustain his work without fees.

“I was up against a channel with deep pockets, fully backed by the Qatari government.”

Picture: Reuters/Stringer

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