2005-2014

New York - Nirashree Munshi, a reporter in an ethnic Indian newspaper, has been crowned New Miss India California. Munshi, who is with the India Post newspaper, won the title at the 2006 edition of the pageant held in Oakland, California. According to a report in India Post, she began her performance with a short introduction of a classical raga called Puryadhanaashree. She followed this up with...

JOHN Fairfax is a company which is a long way from being in the sweet spot. It's caught in an unenviable pincer - a squeeze from the structural migration of classified advertising online, where it is pitched against numerous and canny competitors and a cyclical downturn in advertising. And this explains why its underlying profit fell 3.8 per cent. The only reason its share price has not reflected...

Investigative reporters toil in hidden corners, digging through court records, meeting anonymous whistle blowers in nondescript cafes. It is not uncommon for them to spend a year on a report that makes the front page for only a day or two. They can effect profound policy change, but their jobs usually don’t bring much personal glory. Now some investigative teams will get their “All the President’s...

(MISA/IFEX) - On August 24 2006, the minister for public service and information, Themba Msibi, warned the Swazi media against criticising the king, instilling further fear into an already timid press which cannot freely operate due to a perpetually hostile environment that continues to prevail despite the kingdom's new Constitution which guarantees freedom of expression. The minister's threats...

MILAN, Minn. - The Milan Standard published its final edition this week after a 103-year run, ending the community's claim to be the smallest Minnesota town with its own weekly newspaper. "We lost a piece of our identity," said Ron Anderson, mayor of the western Chippewa County town of 326 people. Publisher Leslie Ehrenberg of the Appleton Press, which has owned and published the Milan Standard...

The woman thrusting free newspapers into the hands of London commuters did not look as though she was on the frontline of a media revolution and a bitter battle between rival newspaper moguls. But yesterday's launch of London Lite, a new free evening paper for the capital, threatens to have repercussions across the country, where venerable evening titles are battling falling sales as younger...

(08-31) 04:00 PDT Washington -- U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, $20 million public-relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq. The contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a program to provide...

New York, August 31, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the criminal defamation trial of Indonesian journalist Teguh Santosa, who faces charges of defaming Islam by posting online controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. State prosecutors outlined the criminal charges, which under Indonesia’s penal code carry a possible five years in prison, at the trial’s opening...

The reach of the print media in India continues to grow at least in terms of numbers – it has increased from 206 million to 222 million in the last one year. This media sector is being driven largely by newspapers with magazines seeing a sharp decline of 12 per cent, acording to the National Readership Survey (NRS) 2006. SPREADING IT WIDER: Dailies continue to grow, adding 12.6 million readers...

Magazines have registered a 12 per cent drop in readership – from 75 million in 2005 to 68 million this year, according to the just-released findings of the National Readership Survey (NRS) 2006. NOT ENTICING ANYMORE: There have been a number of changes in the Top 10 bracket bracket though the top two – Saras Salil and India Today (English) – remain the same. The readership of Saras Salil dipped...