2005-2014

In a 23 August 2000 letter to President Kocheril Raman Narayanan, WAN and the World Editors Forum expressed outrage at the murder of newspaper editor Brajamani Singh. According to reports, two gunmen broke into the house of Singh, editor of the English-language "Manipur News", late at night on 20 August, and shot him dead. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the killing, but police say they...

In a 21 August 2000 letter to the chief minister of the Indian State of Manipur, W. Nipamacha Singh, RSF expressed concern over the murder of Thounaojam Brajamani Singh, editor of the daily "Manipur News". The organisation urged the minister to do everything in his power to establish "the exact motives for the murder" and asked to be kept informed of progress in the inquiry. "The journalist had...

In a 17 August 2000 letter to the chief minister of West Bengal State, Jyoti Basu, RSF protested assaults on journalists by activists of the Communist Party India-Marxist (CPI-M, the ruling party in this eastern Indian state). The organisation asked the chief minister if his declarations condemning the attacks could be followed by acts and sanctions against the authors of the assaults. RSF also...

In an 11 August 2000 letter to Syed Salahuddin, Supreme Commander of the Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, CPJ condemned the 10 August bomb attack in Srinagar, which killed one journalist and seriously injured at least six others. Pradeep Bhatia, a photographer for the Indian newspaper "The Hindustan Times", was one of twelve people killed in the attack, police told reporters. Hezb-ul Mujahedeen spokesman Salim...

In a letter to the head minister of Tamil Nadu, Dr. Karunanidhi, RSF expressed its concern after the murder of V. Selvaraj, a journalist with the biweekly "Nakkeeran". Robert Ménard, the organisation's secretary general, urged him to do everything possible to establish "the exact motives for the murder." RSF asked the head minister to inform it of progress in the inquiry. According to information...

In a letter to the governor of Assam State, S. K. Sinha, RSF protested the assault on a journalist by a magistrate. RSF asked the governor to sanction the magistrate. "Your duty as a governor is to protect journalists who are merely trying to do their work," Robert Ménard, the organisation's secretary-general, reminded him. According to the information collected by RSF, Parag Saikia, a journalist...

ONE BY ONE, THE COUPS were carried out swiftly, often without warning. By May, more than a dozen editors from around the country had left their offices in the past year, mostly under duress, virtually all without new jobs, replaced by other managers eager to get into the game. Press reports painted pictures of brutal departures: In Oklahoma City, Daily Oklahoman Executive Editor Stan Tiner walked...

If the Web can be considered in cosmological terms, then right about now we're in the infinite nanosecond after the Big Bang, an inflationary moment when all that matter spreads itself out. Now things start to coalesce. New technologies and faster connectivity are at work, as is the gravity of financial pressure. In five years thousands of media jobs have come into existence. Headlines that once...

A long, long time ago -- the spring of 1999 -- it seemed as if the Internet had sprinkled financial pixie dust upon the publishing industry. Publications that had only been around for a couple of years, like TheStreet.com and CBSMarket Watch.com, were entering the stock market with smashing success. The market transformed mere Webzines into "Internet content companies" worth as much as a billion...

In the last few years the conventional wisdom has been that the advent of the new media will hasten the demise of print. That newspapers will die as readers get more information from the Internet; magazines will be overwhelmed by the proliferation of inexpensively-produced, niche-oriented sites and Webzines; bound books will be replaced by digitalized e-books. That the culture of print, in short...