2005-2014

WASHINGTON (AFP) - In the emotional aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, US television's often deferential treatment of government officials has been replaced by fiercely combative interviews and scathing commentary. As the scale of carnage became clear and the government was seen as tardy in its response, TV news anchors and reporters dropped their dispassionate reserve in favour of stinging comments...

A new Internet boom is emerging with the growing popularity of syndicated content in the form of Web logs, commercial newsfeeds and podcasts, audio broadcasts that are simple to record and can be downloaded onto MP3players such as iPods or other devices. FeedBurner, a Chicago-based technology startup, is poised to help the writers, publishers and broadcasters who create this content capitalize on...

Hurricanes and floods are ‘natural’ calamities only up to a point. New Orleans has been devastated by both, working together as never before in the generally cursed Gulf Coast of the United States of America. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was not only the breach of the Mississippi levees, unleashing the waters for two days, killing several thousands and rendering many more stranded, homeless...

The International Federation of Journalists, the global organisation representing more than 500,000 journalists in over 110 countries, today welcomed the announcement of a unilateral three month cease-fire by the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. "This is a very positive sign that Nepal can reach a peaceful resolution to a situation that has seen journalists aggressively targeted and attacked by both...

NEW YORK (AP): What do you call people who have been driven from their homes with only the clothes on their backs, unsure if they will ever be able to return, and forced to build a new life in a strange place? News organizations are struggling for the right word. Many, including The Associated Press, have used "refugee" to describe those displaced by the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. But the choice...

As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing. But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis. Instead of secretive "Deep...

THE brute force of a hurricane sparks a reflexive response: fight or flight, cherished pictures or heirloom china, beer or water? And news anchors, too, rely on well-worn instincts: go toward the disaster, set up shop and then stand out in the wind-driven rain to let the storm wreak havoc on their generally well-attended hair. Conditions, they will mostly tell you, are "worsening." But that news...

Journalism seems to have recovered its reason for being. As in the weeks after 9/11, news organizations have plunged into the calamity in New Orleans, with reporters chronicling heartbreaking stories under harrowing conditions in a submerged city. Suddenly, there were no more absurdly hyped melodramas like those of Natalee Holloway or Terri Schiavo, just the all-too-real drama of death and...

The Sanskriti Pratishthan is inviting applications for its annual Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism from young women who wish to investigate and research on any topic of contemporary relevance. The Prabha Dutt Foundation initially administered the Fellowship. The scheme will now be managed by the Sanskriti Pratishthan, which has been giving similar awards for cultural, media and social activism...

Much like Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattercharya and his Marxist government’s attitude towards industrialisation and foreign capital that has been so much in the news of late, the well established Bengali magazines from the ABP stable have also evolved with the times. ‘Desh’, till sometime back a weekly and subsequently a fortnightly, is no longer an anachronistic and essentially literary magazine...