2005-2014

The good news--if you look hard enough, you can find some--may be that the events of September 11 produced both sterling journalism and a higher sense of journalism's purpose. After a summer of Gary Condit and man-eating sharks, acts of domestic terrorism and the specter of an international war against it shook the public and the media from their mutual embrace of the trivial, their romance with...

Money. It cannot buy the most valuable things in life. And sometimes, not even the not-so-valuable things. Like a few more readers for your paper, or magazine. Business houses venturing into publishing have met different fates. Some are dead. Like the Ambani-owned The Business and Political Observer and Vijaypath Singhania's The Indian Post. Others are just cruising along like The Asian Age. Some...

CPJ mourns the tragic deaths of our colleagues Anju Sharma of the Hindustan Times; Sanjiv Sinha of the Indian Express; Ranjan Jha of the television news channel Aaj Tak; and Gopal Bisht, cameraman for Aaj Tak. All four journalists were killed on September 30 when their chartered plane crashed during a flight between New Delhi and Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh State. Four other passengers, including the...

October 2001–Last March, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman gushed that Qatar's wildly popular 24-hour news satellite channel Al-Jazeera [ www.al-jazeera.net] is "not only the biggest media phenomenon to hit the Arab world since the advent of television, it also is the biggest political phenomenon." Commentators continued to heap praise on the Arabic-language news channel, which has managed...

On September 1, miNews, the news-by-mobile service of Mid-Day Multimedia on BPL Mobile phones, became pay. It is just the first step towards the new sources of revenue the company is looking at. One very lucrative source of revenue could be advertising, and according to industry sources, Mid-Day is already in talks with major companies for advertising on miNews. Mid-Day Multimedia has the first...

So startups are going belly-up. That doesn’t mean that online content is dead. Far from it. Squarely here to stay are newspapers, nearly all of which have developed some online presence in recent years to expand their brand of newsgathering. We’ve talked to the online operations of six newspapers--some big, some small, from different areas of the country--to find out about what they’ve built in a...

(Continued from yesterday.) The IDC report had a few interesting comparisons. The break-up of time spent on various media showed that though 48.4 per cent of the respondents said watching TV was their favourite indoor activity, they ended up spending more time on the PC (18 hours per week) than on the TV (16 hours per week). Thus, on an average, among all classes, a little more than two hours were...

On 21 August 2001, an official from the Sikkim police's Criminal Investigation Section arrested Rajesh Bhattarai in Siliguri, West Bengal. Bhattarai is editor of "Aaja Bholi", a Nepali language daily published in Siliguri. According to the daily "Kantipur" (published in Nepal), police arrested Bhattarai on the charge of publishing a news report "which disturbs the communal harmonious relations of...

In a letter addressed to Home Affairs Minister Lal Krishna Advani, RSF protested the attack on three employees and the editor of weekly "Chattan", published in Srinagar (Jammu and Kashmir, north-western India), by members of the security forces. "This type of violence is unworthy of Indian government representatives," said RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard. "It calls for an investigation and...

Yesterday's scheduled contempt of court case against journalist Vineet Narain has been postponed due to violence in Jammu and Kashmir State, the trial venue. It is not known when the next hearing will be held. Narain is the founding editor of the New Delhi-based investigative journal Kalchakra. He faces contempt charges based on a December 16, 2000, Kalchakra article in which Narain alleged that...