2005-2014

LONDON - The debate about internet versus non-internet advertising will become obsolete over the next 10 years, Bill Gates said today. Speaking at the IAB Engage 2005 conference in London, the Microsoft chairman and chief software architect told delegates that traditional media such as television, newspapers and magazines would move to being delivered via the internet within the next decade...

Paris-based press freedom organisation Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has been named one of the three joint winners of this year's Sakharov Prize for the freedom of thought. RSF shares the award with the Ladies in White, a group of wives of jailed Cuban dissidents, and Nigerian human rights lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim, who represents women who face being stoned to death for adultery and people facing...

SAN JOSE, Calif. - To survive in the age of blogs, iPods and Craigslist, newspapers must capitalize on their credibility and local strengths while figuring out how best to make money from their new media ventures, a panel of industry experts said Thursday. The task is hardly simple as newspapers struggle at the same time with declining print readership, dwindling revenue growth and smaller staffs...

Internet users are demanding more of websites while becoming less trustful of them, and adjusting their behaviour in response to what they see as real threats online. Almost a third say they are cutting back their Web use, says a survey report by Consumer Reports WebWatch. GOOD BUY: Twentynine per cent online shoppers say they have cut back on how often they buy on the Internet. The report, Leap...

Indian Muzamil Jaleel was among three reporters who were awarded the Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism in New York on Wednesday. The other two awardees, Canada’s Patrick Graham and Poland’s Pawel Smolenski, were selected for their reporting from Iraq. Muzamil Jaleel © KSMF Underwritten by the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund and Reuters, and administered by the Columbia University Graduate...

A freelance journalist who was involved in the broadcast of rape allegations last week against a Navi Mumbai police constable, which led to the lawman's arrest, tried to commit suicide on Wednesday alleging mental harrassment by the police. TELECASTING ASPERTIONS: The Nerul policeman was arrested after a mobile conversation with the alleged victim was telecast on Sahara Samay. Pawan Bhargav was...

IN terms of brazen spin, Stephen Mayne's reports of the News Corporation annual general meeting in New York were classics. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Mayne, doubling as a reporter and shareholder activist, accused News of indulging in brazen spin, yet he was incapable, or unwilling, to keep his own passions and conspiratorial opinions under control. Mayne, the former owner of the...

Spam, scams and scatterbrains -- the same problems that plagued the old internet are cropping up again in a new wave of technologies known collectively as Web 2.0. But this time around, proponents say Web 2.0 has been better engineered to withstand the troubles that wrecked Usenet, BBSes and free e-mail. The cycle is so predictable, it's almost a natural law: Every new internet movement popular...

For a brief moment in early September, it looked like the United States was about to have a long-overdue national conversation about race and poverty. While the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans flooded and thousands of poor – and predominantly black – residents waited on rooftops to be rescued or stumbled their way to the Superdome in hope of assistance from the authorities, for once a bright light...

One of the standard arguments for the superiority of "free enterprise" is that in the wake of economic freedom -- defined as the freedom of capital to enrich itself -- political and other freedoms follow in its wake. There are a few problems with this argument: first, it is often framed in the broad sweep of history, looking ahead at decades or even centuries. Most people don’t have centuries or...