2005-2014

The preamble to the Constitution says one of its purposes is to "provide for the common defense." Its First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. Those goals are not contradictory, but there are times – especially times of war – when they tug in opposite directions. This is an instructive point for evaluating whether journalists have enjoyed sufficient access to the war on terrorism. The...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today sent a letter of inquiry to Dr. Vishnu Kant Shastri, governor of Uttar Pradesh State, India, requesting information about the April 14 death of journalist Paritosh Pandey. Pandey, a crime reporter for the Hindi-language daily Jansatta Express, was shot dead at point-blank range at around 10:30 p.m. in his home in the residential neighborhood of...

Call it a contradiction, but the feeling that stays after watching the new 90-second television commercial for newspaper brand The Asian Age is a strange admixture of lingering despair and indomitable hope. Despair because there is a certain pain, a certain melancholy in the mood of the commercial… a kind of visual déjà vu that percolates through the senses and settles unsettlingly on the mind. A...

Last week, the Mumbai-based Chitralekha group won "The Media Marketer of the Year" Award (for the year 2001) at the EMVIE Awards 2002. The award was for best media marketing across all media, and all over the country. Among the others nominated for the award were the television channel, MTV, and the newspaper group, Dainik Bhaskar. The award was based on the major media marketing innovations that...

In a letter sent to the Indian Minister of External Affairs, Jaswant Singh, Reporters sans frontières (Reporters Without Borders - RSF) asked for the real reasons for the arrest of Burmese journalist Soe Myint, managing editor of the Mizzima press agency. "We are justified in asking whether the arrest of this journalist, reputed for his reporting on human rights violations in Burma, has a direct...

In a letter to Vishnu Kant Shastri, governor of the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh, RSF expressed indignation over the murder of Paritosh Pandey, a crime reporter for the Hindi-language local daily "Jansatta Express", in Lucknow (northern India). "If this crime goes unpunished, the entire profession will feel at risk. According to his family and colleagues, this cowardly assassination could be...

In a letter to the interior minister of the state of Gujarat, Gordhan Zadaphia, RSF denounced the attack on some twenty journalists by police of Gujarat State in western India. "After accusing the media of exaggerating the extent of the recent wave of inter-community violence in the state of Gujarat, the authorities of this state used the most reprehensible behavior to prevent journalists from...

Media group The Hindustan Times Ltd and Sify.com, the consumer portal of Satyam Infoway Ltd, have entered a cross-promotion deal. This tie-up will enable both Sify.com as well as the Hindustan Times and its site Hindustantimes.com to leverage each other's resources to gain more visibility. Not only this, the two companies will pitch for advertisers with offers of a wider reach and offer better...

Sharon Peters is a recidivist editor. She devoted half a career to helping run newsrooms, then sidestepped into consulting. Now, after eight years, she has relapsed and resumed the newspaper life, much smarter, she hopes, for being gone awhile. Peters believes she learned a lot about editing during her time away, and she plans to act on those lessons now that she has a second chance, born again...

Ron Recinto had been toiling at daily newspapers for more than 10 years when an old friend called him up to lure him away from the world of crackling police scanners, city budgets and agate type. It was September 2000, the tail end of the Internet boom, and Recinto, now 36, was an editor at the State in Columbia, South Carolina. He loved his job, he cherished newspapers and he had no plans to...