2005-2014

New York, April 25, 2006 - Two more journalists have been sentenced to jail on revived charges under Ethiopia's 1992 press law, according to CPJ sources. Wosonseged Gebrekidan, who is already jailed on antistate charges, was sentenced to 16 months for defamation on April 18. Freelance writer Abraham Reta was sentenced yesterday to one year and jailed the same day. Gebrekidan, editor of the now...

(CEMESP/IFEX) - On 25 April 2006, three newspaper executives (Stanley Seakor of the "Analyst", Kenneth Best of the daily "Observer", Tom Kamara of the "New Democrat") appeared before the Senate Committee on Information and Broadcasting after being summoned by the body. The three papers for which they work have been accused by the Senate of publishing "false and misleading stories" about the Senate...

(AMARC/HRinfo/WPFC/IFEX) - Freedom in Tunisia remains well below international standards five months after the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was held in Tunis in November 2005, in spite of commitments made by Tunisian authorities to uphold guarantees to free expression enshrined in international conventions and treaties, to which Tunisia is a signatory. An International Freedom of...

Canada's new Conservative government banned the media from showing live images of the flag-draped coffins of four Canadian soldiers when their bodies were returned from Afghanistan. The families of at least two soldiers said they were disturbed by the media blackout and the lack of lowered flags. The government has stopped lowering flags to half-staff outside Parliament each time a Canadian...

As dozens gathered Tuesday night in a University of Chicago lecture hall to discuss the visceral and sometimes violent reaction to cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslim students who had been invited decided to watch a movie across campus instead. The three-man panel discussion, organized by the university's chapter of the Objectivist Club, mainly focused on the U.S. media's reluctance...

Circa 1996. A close look at an A H Wheeler newsstand at any Indian railway station reveals hardly 40 magazines on display, and that too in the film and generals interest category. Circa 2006. A close look at the same newsstand shows up more than a 100 magazines. What's up? The Indian print media sector has got into the grip of magazine mania ever since the government permitted foreigners to invest...

Brown McClatchy Maloney of Sequim tells this story to illustrate how far The McClatchy Co., his family's newspaper chain, has come in 40 years: In the late 1960s, another newspaper family put its Olympia and Bellingham papers up for sale. One of Maloney's older cousins thought McClatchy, whose only daily papers at the time were in Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto, Calif., should at least look into...

April 26, 2006) -- Ted Vaden, public editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., recently noted the complaints of local residents who were surprised to find that comments they had posted in a Yahoo neighborhood chat room had been quoted by a reporter in the paper. The Fox Run, N.C., residents had used their own names in complaining about a nearby nightclub that they claimed was a disturbance...

SEATTLE - Two newspaper executives took time out from negotiations for the purchase of the Mercury News and three other Knight Ridder papers Tuesday to discuss the future of the newspaper industry. Gary Pruitt, chairman and chief executive officer of McClatchy, and Dean Singleton, vice chairman and chief executive officer of MediaNews, agreed that newspapers aren't headed for extinction despite...

News and information provider Reuters today claimed to have matched the market share of arch-rival Bloomberg for the first time in "at least 10 years". As it delivered forecast-busting growth in first quarter revenues to £633 million, Reuters argued that over the course of last year it increased its share of the £6 billion market for financial information and services by 1 per cent, to 27 per cent...