2005-2014

Zimbabwe has allowed the BBC and CNN to resume operations in the country. This development is the outcome of meetings held by representatives of the organisations with the Minister of Media, Information and Publicity, Webster Shamu and his Permanent Secretary, George Charamba, the Zimbabwe Standard has reported. The details: [ Link] The BBC last officially covered in Zimbabwe in 2001 five weeks...

More than 1,000 publishers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Dallas Morning News have signed on to participate in the Fair Syndication Consortium, a model built to help publishers receive compensation for their content, Editor & Publisher has reported. AdBrite, an online marketplace to buy and sell advertising, has agreed to work with the consortium to help partners...

The Ann Arbor News published its final edition last week, the latest US newspaper to abandon print for an online future, says an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report. "Farewell, Ann Arbor," read a banner headline on last Thursday's edition of the 174-year-old daily, the only newspaper in the town in the northern state of Michigan. The closure of the Ann Arbor News makes the city, which has a...

The Russian government has drafted legislation that would make it easier for news agencies to contest plagiarism of their reports, drawing cheers from big outlets like Interfax and RIA-Novosti, but critics say the bill is too vague to be effective, according to a Moscow Times report. The law, drafted by the Communications and Press Ministry, would extend copyright protection to news reports, with...

A start-up in Colorado lets readers pick which articles they want in their magazine and then print it themselves, says a New York Times report. The company, Printcasting, has a website www.printcasting.com on which anyone can put together a magazine featuring their own blog posts or articles and items from blogs and newspapers that have registered with the site. Advertisers can place ads in the...

The police in the city of Muzaffarabad barred journalists from entering the court room on July 27 to cover the case against three colleagues who had been accused of scandalising the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK). According to press reports, when media teams from Islamabad and other areas reached the court building, they saw a large contingent of police...

The Palestinian military intelligence service arrested freelance journalist Mustafa Sabri from his home in Qalqilya, in the northern West Bank, on Wednesday morning, the Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) has reported. His wife said that military intelligence personnel arrived at their home at 1:00 a.m. (local time) and took her husband to an unknown location. Sabri had...

Three bloggers have been detained with charge in Egypt since last week, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Islamist blogger Abdel Rahman Ayyash, who writes for Al-Ghareeb (The Stranger), was arrested at the Cairo airport on Tuesday on his return from Turkey where he attended a youth conference, according to multiple news reports. Muslim Brotherhood member Magdi Saad, who used...

The interim government in Honduras has been maintaining a selective censorship of news in the country since the June 28 coup d’état. Media regarded as critical of President Roberto Micheletti are being systematically obstructed. The programming of Radio Globo, one of the few media still criticising the new regime, is often interrupted. Soldiers tried to force their way into its studios on July 25

Unidentified individuals harassed and attacked journalists working at the Tegucigalpa offices of the online daily Hondudiario.com three times in two weeks, the Committee for Protection of Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting local journalists and news reports. Though the attacks appeared to be robberies, the daily's director told CPJ he believed they were retaliation for the Hondudiario.com's...