2005-2014

11 May 2001

Thirteen media professionals beaten by paramilitary forces in Kashmir

In a letter to the director general of Border Security Forces (BSF, paramilitary forces), Gurbachan Jagat, RSF protested the attack on thirteen photographers, cameramen and journalists by BSF members in Jammu and Kashmir province. The organisation asked that an investigation be conducted to identify and take sanctions against the authors of this attack. RSF asked to be kept informed of progress in...

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11 May 2001

Troops attack journalists at a civilian funeral in Kashmir

Seventeen journalists were attacked today by Indian security forces as they attempted to cover a funeral procession in the troubled Kashmir region. The incident occurred in Magam, a town about 17 miles (28 kilometers) north of the state capital, Srinagar. Three of the journalists were hospitalized and thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment was destroyed, according to local and...

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1 May 2001

CJR morale survey

Low morale -- is it common in newsrooms across America? An overwhelming percentage of journalists who participated in a nationwide cjr survey answered yes to that question. Fully 84 percent believe that poor morale is a widespread problem among newspeople. Only 15 percent think it is not. We also asked: » Is your newsroom environment more positive or less positive now than it was a year ago? Three...

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1 May 2001

Humpty Dumpty happened

The financial status of new media resembles real estate development in the early 1980s, when tax laws supported huge debt that fueled extravagant building. When tax laws changed, however, the original business assumptions no longer supported the big, expensive projects, many of which went bankrupt. Most were purchased out of receivership at amounts supportable by new market realities, and they...

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1 May 2001

Leaving Readers Behind

"I BELIEVE IN THE PROFESSION of journalism. I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of lesser service than the public service is a betrayal of this trust." --Walter Williams The Journalist's Creed 1914 "W E STAND FOR EXCELLENT service to customers and communities, a...

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30 April 2001

TV movements are harmful for journos

New channels, new programming genres, new marketing tactics - poll a random sample of media practitioners and they come out with these as the defining characteristics of Indian television in the recent past. I would like to add one, and right at the beginning, please - people. It's the new game in town - channel-surfing. It's partly due to new channels, partly due to the Net and partly due to the...

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30 April 2001

Language Internet services : the new growth area

Consider this. In the world of off-line media in India, non-English media dominate English media and the penetration of language media is more than four times the penetration of English media (Indian Readership survey 2000). However, only 11.5 per cent of the estimated 8 million net users in India are aware of language sites. The current penetration of language Internet services? About 9.5 per...

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1 April 2001

Our nose for news fails us when the smell is close to home

Consider the various ways in which newspapering's fitful struggles with profit pressures set us journalists against ourselves, cause us to lose our bearings, and behave against type. They rob us, for one thing, of our reporting edge. If any other, equally important, business in town were downsizing as newspapers have been, we'd be all over the story. We'd never let other executives get away with...

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1 April 2001

AOL/TW spells big

Even on a clear, crisp Manhattan day, it was difficult to imagine the colossus about to take shape at Columbus Circle, at the southwest corner of Central Park, where three construction cranes hovered over the remains of the Robert Moses-era Coliseum. This hole in the ground is to become AOL Time Warner Center, the headquarters of the newly united company. The $1.7 billion complex will feature a...

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19 March 2001

Nava Bharat defines distribution as competitive strength

Nearly six months back, the 67-year-old Nava Bharat Group, known mainly for its Hindi daily of the same name published in 11 editions, took an interesting step. It began constructing an FMCG-like distribution system in hometown Nagpur. Dividing the city into zones, it appointed about 400 company-controlled franchisees. Around the same time, it launched its first Marathi newspaper, Nava Rashtra, in...

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