2005-2014

Samar is one of those whom I call a “friend of newspapers”. He is well read, has a keen interest in public affairs and has periodically penned very readable book reviews and useful pieces on information technology. So when he confessed over the phone that he had virtually stopped reading newspapers seriously, I knew it was time to worry. It’s not that he had actually stopped buying a newspaper. In...

New Delhi: Indian-American academic and journalist, Dr Sarmila Bose, becomes the first Director of the new Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University. Bose, who was schooled in Kolkata, received her A B from Bryn Mawr College and her MPA and PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University. Dr Bose has...

BBC News is to axe 108 jobs by the end of March next year in a bid to save £11m as part of director general Mark Thompson's "Value for money" cost-cutting initiative. It is thought well-known correspondents will be among those to lose their jobs, although no names have yet been confirmed. BBC News' management will also see cuts, with one-third of the division's current executives to go - six posts...

PARIS (AFP) - France's emblematic left-wing daily Liberation, crippled by falling reader numbers and mounting losses, may be forced to shed up to a third of its workforce as part of a last-ditch rescue plan to be unveiled on Wednesday. Founded in the wake of the 1968 student protests by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the paper, long an icon of the French left, has been pushed to the verge of...

If you’d asked six months ago about the future of blogs, the answer you got was that they were last year’s news. New blogs were popping up by the second, but already they had been largely dismissed as being too small to be of much value to most mainstream advertisers, the P&Gs and GMs and IBMs. In just these few months, there’s been a major shift in thinking. Now it’s less about whether blogs are...

A trial last week at the South Jakarta District Court passed largely unnoticed, although the court's decision indicated a seismic shift in the Indonesian judiciary. To understand this shift we need only to hear what the presiding judge said in delivering the court's decision in the trial of a journalist charged with religious blasphemy for reprinting the controversial cartoons of the Prophet...

JAKARTA, Sep 26 (IPS) - An Indonesian journalist has news for those of the country's Muslims who have turned to terrorism to express rage. ''Journalism is my jihad,'' says Agung Rulianto, who leads a team of investigative reporters for the 'Tempo' weekly magazine. While the term jihad is often used to refer to armed struggle many Muslim scholars are agreed that it denotes a striving of any type...

New York, September 26, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by news that Uzbek journalist Dzhamshid Karimov, nephew of the president, has been forced into psychiatric hospitalization. CPJ is also gravely concerned by reports that raise disturbing questions about the treatment of jailed reporter Ulugbek Khaidarov. “We’re shocked at the brutal methods used against these two...

PARIS: The unlikely marriage between a Rothschild heir and Liberation, the left-wing tabloid born in the rubble of France's 1968 student riots, is already on the rocks. Edouard de Rothschild, who last year paid €20 million (US$26 million) to become the newspaper's biggest shareholder, is to present a "last chance" turnaround plan to staff representatives and other board members Wednesday, amid...

Amnesty International is dismayed at today’s news that yet another case has been opened against journalist Hrant Dink on charges of “denigrating Turkishness” under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The organization considers that this prosecution is part of an emerging pattern of harassment against the journalist exercising his right to freedom of expression -- a right which Turkey, as a...