mobile apps – Gretchen A. Peck

By Gretchen A. Peck

For many of their users, mobile messaging apps are just expedient little tools for texting and sharing photos or videos with friends who use the same app. The fact that those messages and content are encrypted is just an added a perk. But for journalists and their sources—especially sensitive sources like whistleblowers—encrypted messaging apps are an increasingly valuable means of communication, which provide a modicum of assurance that the information being exchanged is private and protected from anyone outside of that conversational relationship.

Read on at Editor & Publisher:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/feature/how-encrypted-mobile-messaging-apps-are-helping-journalists-protect-and-guard-sources-and-their-information/

Photo: Devlin Barrett. Barrett covers national security and law enforcement for The Washington Post.

There’s a scene in filmmaker Chris Foster’s Black & White and Dead All Over — a documentary that chronicles the painful gutting of the newspaper industry, our raw and recent past, when newspersons offer perspective narration about the advent of digital publishing. “Lemmings” is how one hard-nosed journalist refers to publishers at that moment in time when they heavily invested resources into design and deployment of their website, and as another pointed out, without any clear vision or understanding of the business models.

And, so here we are again, faced with the challenge of a new publishing model — mobile — and all the dilemmas associated with devices and content and advertising, oh my!

Published by Editor & Publisher magazine, April 2014

Tag: mobile apps

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