2005-2014

Journalists have enough worries: cutbacks, bloggers, a geriatric audience. But here's one more: They should worry that bright young people who might once have been heading into newsrooms are going into public relations instead. Worse, these people aren't going just for the money. Journalism – assailed by self-doubt and public mistrust – is in danger of losing its next generation of idealists to PR...

Ten communications unions representing a million workers are banding together to provide a united front in the face of "rapid media consolidation and massive technological shifts." That will include organizing, collective bargaining, and pushing for public policy. And in a separate move, one of those guilds, the Writers Guild of America East, joined with its West Coast counterpart Thursday to mend...

LONDON - The Wall Street Journal is publishing an eight-page guide to the compact version of its European and Asian editions, which launch later this month. The guide, which will be published on Monday October 10, will explain the new format to readers of the paper's international editions and is being produced in the same format as the new compact version. It will contain many of the design...

From the rise of transparency to the decline of newsprint, every PR pro needs to remain on top of the ever-changing media landscape. Portability of video content "It's an understatement to say that the news media have changed almost cosmically over the past several years," says Laurence Moskowitz, CEO of Medialink. And that change, he adds, is not a result of content or society's appetite, but is...

News aggregator Topix.net will soon begin distributing contextually-targeted headline "modules" to publisher partners, in a deal that involves sharing the resulting ad revenue. The product builds upon work Topix.net has been doing with 177 Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Tribune Company sites. (Together, the newspaper publishers own a three-quarter stake in Topix.net.) The company has developed...

It has been around longer than Google, but RSS is finally breaking out of the tech dungeon and into the mainstream -- so where's the advertising angle? Pop quiz hotshot, when was RSS invented? Here are a couple of hints: it's older than the iPod and older than Google. Give up? 1997, when RSS was released by Netscape. Since then, Netscape dropped RSS and it bobbled around between obscure software...

Newspapers must refocus all their energies on revenue growth and circulation growth if they are to reverse perceptions that are clouding the industry's future, according to a new report titled "Newspaper Outlook 2006: Managing Perceptions." Such a focus would be a departure from the newspaper industry's current defensive posture that is producing lost market share for readers and advertisers. The...

New York, October 5, 2005 – The Committee to Protect Journalists today held the Nepalese authorities responsible for the death of an imprisoned reporter who died after being denied proper medical treatment. Maheshwar Pahari, 30, who worked for the weekly Rastriya Swabhiman, died of tuberculosis on Tuesday, according to local journalist groups. Pahari died in a hospital in Pokhara, 80 miles (130...

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. has acquired Upcoming.org, an online event planning site that's expected to infuse the Internet powerhouse with more content about local communities. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company confirmed the deal late Tuesday without disclosing financial terms of the acquisition. Los Angeles-based Upcoming acts as a social calendar that depends on its users to post free listings...

The warm tone of the letter from White House insider Lewis "Scooter" Libby to Judith Miller of the New York Times conveyed an essential reality of reporter-source relationships, which we in the media sometimes tend to play down: These are often relationships between like-minded people who care about the same issues and who become -- dare I say it? -- friendly. "Your reporting, and you, are missed...