2005-2014

(WiPC/IFEX) - The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN is delighted by the 8 May 2007 news that journalist and human rights defender, Umida Niyazova, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on 1 May 2007, has had her sentence reduced to a suspended term by an appeal court. According to a report on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, she has been released. On 1 May, Sergely District...

Since the death of Anna Politkovskaya, indictments of the Kremlin's attitudes to press freedom have proved increasingly uncomfortable for the authorities. Maria Yulikova of the Committee to Protect Journalists reports. Freedom House’s annual report Freedom of the Press, released last month, caused an outcry over the state of local media in Russia. Freedom House, a leading American civil rights...

LAHORE: There has been a major escalation in the incidents of attacks on media in general, including government attempts to muzzle the media, in Pakistan during May 3, 2006, to May 3, 2007, but the broadcast media in particular wrote a chapter in defiance by asserting itself despite the rising intimidation it faced, according to the Annual State of Pakistan Media Report 2006-07 released by...

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Leading media executives took a combative tone against Internet companies on Tuesday, suggesting that Big Media increasingly considers new content distributors like Google Inc. to be more foe than friend. At a panel discussion on the second day of the 56th annual National Cable & Telecommunications Association conference, top executives said talk of the demise of traditional...

KABUL: Afghanistan’s government, competing with the Taliban for public support and trying to fend off accusations that it is corrupt and ineffective, is moving to curb one of its own most impressive achievements: the country’s flourishing independent news media. Under President Hamid Karzai, a 1960s media law was updated and has been considered the most liberal in the region. Six independent...

LONDON - Thomson may have done extensive homework before revealing its $18 billion takeover bid for Reuters Group on Tuesday, but even that may not be enough to ensure that a tie-up between the world's second- and third-largest providers of financial data gets past the regulators. Analysts say competition concerns will be the deal's main stumbling block. "A move to a global duopoly in market data...

One of the trickiest things for a news organization to do is cover itself. That was the situation some editors at The Wall Street Journal found themselves in last month when they learned that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation was making a $5 billion bid for the Journal’s parent, Dow Jones, at least a week before the news broke elsewhere. It was one of the biggest business news events of the year...

May 8 (Bloomberg) -- Dow Jones & Co., whose controlling shareholders rebuffed a $5 billion takeover bid from News Corp. last week, said advertising revenue at the Wall Street Journal fell the most in almost two years last month. Ad sales dropped 12 percent and volume fell 13 percent, dragged down by a 35 percent plunge in computer-technology advertising and a drop of 16 percent in financial ads...

CAIRO -- Journalists from five Arab countries are to launch a media watchdog group in reaction to what they call increased restrictions on press workers in the region, its founders said Tuesday. Twenty reporters from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, and Libya will launch the Cairo-based Free Media Workers Union in June, an initiative supported by Egyptian-American sociologist and human rights...

As opposed to parachute or embedded journalism where there is the solace of jetting out or the sinking into the confines of a green zone, the Kashmiri journalists as inhabitants of the region have to work not only as scribes but also live as the daily victims of the conflict. In a recent incident unidentified gunmen in civvies (probably belonging to the Special Operation group of the security...