2005-2014

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has set up a high-powered committee on information, communication and entertainment (ICE) which will be headed by the Principal Secretary to the PM. The committee would identify new opportunities in the areas of information, communication and entertainment where the government was expected to play a pro-active role to promote Indian media and entertainment...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Dec. 29 (UPI) -- The Arab media have come a long way recently. Only a decade ago the media landscape in the Arab world looked pretty bleak. Only a handful of sharp and courageous writers were then publishing their eye-opening articles in newspapers printed abroad. Today that situation has completely changed. The Arab public now has several independent news channels and many...

Prague, 29 December 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Afghan journalist Ali Mohaqeq Nasab, the editor of the "Hoqoq-e-Zan" (Women's Rights) monthly, was sentenced to two years in prison in October on blasphemy charges. An appeals court reduced that to a six-month suspended sentence last week, after Nasab -- who is also an Islamic scholar --apologized for articles he had written that questioned the harsh punishment...

Internet users share many common interests, but men are heavier consumers of news, stocks, sports and pornography while more women look for health and religious guidance, a broad survey of US Web usage has found. Trends are marked now: young women are more likely to be online than young men. And black women have surged online in the last three years. Pew Internet Project surveys between January...

NEW ORLEANS – To New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, the front porch gatherings felt like an extension of his work – another way to talk with his neighbors about everything that had happened since Hurricane Katrina. A collection of old and new friends arrived on the stoop of his Uptown home most nights following the storm. Their stories flowed, along with the cold bottles of Abita...

The year 2005 rocked! It was a year that witnessed the biggest growth in advertising spends in the last four years. AdEx India, a division of TAM Media Research, estimates the total advertising revenues across TV, print, radio, out of home (OOH), cinema and internet at Rs 13,200 crore. A whopping 14.1% growth over 2004. Of course, TV and print had their own story to tell. While TV grew by 11.4 %...

A group of Ukrainian journalists, members of the Ukrainian delegation that arrived in Moscow to take part in a roundtable, have been arrested in "Sheremetievo" airport in Moscow. UNIAN was told about it by telephone by member of the Ukrainian delegation Serhiy Taran, director of the International Institute of Democracies. S.Taran said that among the arrested journalist there are camera groups of...

Twenty-five years after the alleged rape and murder of a woman journalist in Orissa, a statue of hers has been put up in a village as a mark of respect. Chabirani Das was gangraped and murdered near the Beluakhai beach in the coastal district of Jagatsinghpur on Oct 3, 1980. She was staying along with her husband Naba and a child at Dihasaibiri village in the same district. Chabirani was a...

Bill Gates made news this month when he said Microsoft's MSN search engine might give away cash or software to get people to use the site. Actually, Yahoo and Google are already exploring that ground, although they are relying on other companies to do it for them. Like many other Web sites, a pair of online newcomers, Blingo and GoodSearch, license search technology from Google and Yahoo and earn...

BEIJING -The top editor of one of China's boldest newspapers has been dismissed in what observers said was a move to strengthen Communist Party control over the media. Yang Bin, the editor-in-chief of the Beijing News – a tabloid that has often reported on official missteps and misdeeds – was removed on Wednesday, Chinese journalists and media experts said. The precise reasons for Yang's dismissal...