2005-2014

SEATTLE (AP) -- With subscribers canceling and ad revenues sliding, editors gathering this week were hunting ways to harness the Internet's power to lure back readers and win over those who've never picked up a print edition. Despite the gloomy statistics, panelists at the American Society of Newspaper Editors' annual meeting insisted that news of the newspaper's imminent demise has been greatly...

Independent media in the countries of the former Soviet Union, already operating under extreme duress, came under further assault over the course of the last year. The political, legal, and economic environments in most of the non-Baltic former Soviet countries remain distinctly inhospitable to independent journalism. This reality is reflected in "Freedom Of The Press 2006," the latest edition of...

The BBC this week revealed a new six-year cross-media editorial strategy that include more personalisation, audio visual material and user-generated content on its website. The 'Creative future' plans have been drawn up after one year of research into changing lifestyles, use of technology and increased audience interaction, and how different the media landscape will look by 2012. Research was...

PRAGUE, April 28, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- "Journalists, like human-rights defenders in some of the countries of Central Asia, work in conditions of tremendous adversity because many of the governments in Central Asia want to do everything to avoid public scrutiny of government policy, public scrutiny of government processes, of government budgets of any kind of government work," said Rachel Denber...

Can the Internet be politically censored? Or is it essentially uncontrollable, as suggested by the apparently unstoppable downloading of music? From a technical standpoint, the answer seems to be that in a country sufficiently authoritarian, the Net can be controlled. China is an example. The clever may find ways around things like site-blocking, but most won't. In America, child porn gets quietly...

A huge media inflation will remain for advertisers in the foreseeable future, according to media agency MindShare, which anticipates the cost of buying TV will rise by 10 per cent or more in at least eight regional markets over the course of the year. TV, which accounts for around two-thirds of ad spend in Asia-Pacific, is set to experience double-digit inflation in 2006 in China, Hong Kong, India...

Yahoo’s Hong Kong subsidiary provided private information to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of writer Wang Xiaoning on charges of incitement to subvert state power, a human rights group said. Wang was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in September 2003, due in part to writings distributed over the Internet. The case just recently came to light, according to Human Rights in China...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has protested against the 22 April 2006 ban imposed by the federal government on TV coverage of the return of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. On the evening of April 25, the media were not allowed into the military airbase at Trenton, near Toronto. "The Canadian government is following the bad example set by the U.S. administration if it thinks it can hide...

New York, April 26, 2006 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by reports that Israeli soldiers have attacked Palestinian journalists covering unrest in the West Bank city of Nablus on at least two occasions this month. On April 17, soldiers fired at a group of cameramen and photographers covering an Israeli army raid on a house in the Old City of Nablus. Nasser Ishtayeh and Abdal...

New York, April 26, 2006 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the vicious beating by 10 unidentified assailants of a journalist from a suspended opposition newspaper in Kazakhstan. Kenzhegali Aitbakiyev of Aina Plyus was beaten unconscious as he was walking in the financial capital, Almaty, late Sunday, local and international press reported. Aitbakiyev, who has worked at Aina...