2005-2014

The long-awaited "explanations"–one from the New York Times and another from the newspaper’s senior correspondent Judith Miller–about what led her to go to jail rather than testify before a federal grand jury, and then testify 85 days later, have raised more questions than answers. The Times’ page one news story and Miller’s "personal account" published Sunday portray behavior that has far more in...

I THOUGHT IT WAS only in fairy tales that Cinderella married a prince, but now handsome suitors are lining up to court the once-derided, much-maligned AOL. Who would have guessed? AOL's very name was such an embarrassment that it was ignominiously stripped from the media and entertainment entity it helped create, AOL Time Warner. Now the dowdy dial-up Internet service, long overshadowed by the...

Blogs will play an important role in the future of advertising, entrepreneurs said Tuesday, but for now the bulk of ad dollars from these web journals still appears to be flowing to search engine Google. Venture capitalists and Internet executives gathered at the ThinkEquity technology and investor conference in Half Moon Bay, California, are looking for ways to make money on the trend of consumer...

Two years ago a scandal involving a rogue reporter called Jayson Blair plunged the New York Times into a crisis that triggered the removal of its editor, his deputy and a painful period of self-examination. Now the Times faces another scandal involving another favoured reporter and is enduring a similar bout of self-criticism. Some media critics and even Times staff members fear the fall-out could...

The government's loser attitude got exposed a couple of days before Dashain when it formally made the new Press Ordinance public. The Post and our sister publication Kantipur had announced as long as five months ago that the ordinance had been passed by the Cabinet. The ordinance received such scathing criticism that the apologists started defending that no draft ordinance had been passed. Even...

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is selling himself on eBay to raise money for a Jerusalem hi-tech college. Murdoch has set a reserve price of $25,000 per ticket for the lunch date with him, and all profits will go to the Jerusalem College of Technology, praised by the News Corporation boss as an institute "producing top-notch graduates." According to Britain's The Guardian newspaper, Murdoch has "long...

AMERICA ONLINE HAS HIRED BLOG monitoring firm Intelliseek to provide it with buzz-tracking data, including information on the blogosphere's most popular posts and news stories, the companies announced Monday. The arrangement also gives AOL the ability to syndicate BlogPulse's two blogs--BlogPulse Newswire, which summarizes daily blog activity, and BlogPulse Spotlight, which focuses on...

Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Nepal's press restrictions introduced on Oct. 9 will harm the process for holding free elections, said Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization. "The new curbs on media rights contained in this ordinance would indicate that the situation is getting worse,'' Matsuura said yesterday in Paris, according to the UN's Web site...

KATHMANDU, Oct 18 - Eleven international organizations related to media have univocally criticized the newly promulgated media ordinance aimed at imposing curbs on news in Nepal. "We condemn the 'Ordinance Amending some of the Nepal Acts related to Media' promulgated on October 9," stated a joint statement issued by Media Services International on behalf of 'International Press Freedom and Freedom...

FAJARDO, Puerto Rico (AdAge.com) -- The much-anticipated, and some say long-overdue, revised guidelines from the American Society of Magazine Editors finally emerged today at the American Magazine Conference in Puerto Rico. The biggest difference between the old and the new, however, is their length; the new rules are summed up in a one-page pamphlet, where the old guidelines filled a five-page...