2005-2014

It is not uncommon for those in power, in whichever country they ‘reign’, to lose touch with the common man. And while we would not expect US President George W Bush to answer his cell phone to a concerned citizen with a question or genuine concern, in a small community the local political body cannot afford to distance themselves from the people and must give them direct access to the democratic...

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- Reports from Moscow suggest that one of the last independent media outlets in Russia, the business daily Kommersant, is to be bought by the state-controlled Gazprom giant. This is depressing news for supporters of Russian democracy who understand that even the dwindling remnant of Russia`s once-boisterous free press has been an important counter to the...

Type the words citizen journalism into Google, and you'll get roughly 17 million results. And each will have a different definition for the term. The discussion of the topic generally centres around blogs. Now, blogs are sort of online diary, right? Sometimes that means you're talking about just how cute your toy poodle is -- day after day after day. Entry 3368: "Toy poodle still cute! Click for...

NPR.org, April 5, 2006 · Hundreds of foreign journalists visit the United States each year at the invitation of the State Department. They visit a variety of newsrooms, meet their American counterparts and see for themselves how our journalism works in Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the country. Last week, five American journalists and academics (including me), were invited to return the...

The most-hyped site redesign in years has to be the updated look of the New York Times. With the new design, the Times is making a lot of significant assumptions: that visitors have large monitors; that people can navigate dense, confusing layouts; that multimedia bandwidth is not a major problem anymore; and that mainstream sites need to incorporate user input. When the paper sometimes known as...

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Forgive the bad pun, but global warming has become a hot topic in the mass media. ABC News spent two days focusing on climate change last month. Time ran a cover story headlined, "Be Worried. Be Very Worried." HBO will show a documentary called "Too Hot Not to Handle" on Earth Day. Next month, Paramount plans to release "An Inconvenient Truth," a theatrical film about former...

During the struggle against Saddam Hussein's regime, Kurdish peshmerga fighters sought refuge in the mountains surrounding the northern Iraqi cities of Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. From here the peshmerga launched raids against Iraqi forces. Often accompanying them were the guerilla propagandists of the dominant Kurdish political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or K.D.P., and the Patriotic...

NEW YORK: Now that reporter Jill Carroll has been released from captivity after nearly three months, flown home to the United States, reunited with her family, and even visited her paper's newsroom, what's next? As far as The Christian Science Monitor is concerned, that's up to her. And the paper is in no hurry for her to decide. "We don't have a plan and it is not a question we have posed to her...

While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information. The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year. Top-ranked sites...

FUKUOKA (Kyodo) A TV reporter in Fukuoka Prefecture who was arrested Sunday on suspicion of raping a high school girl in November has admitted raping other women, police said Monday. Hiroyuki Kitamura, 29, a reporter at RKB Mainichi Broadcasting Corp. and a resident of the city of Fukuoka, was arrested Sunday along with Toshio Tashima, 39, a gas station employee residing in Onojo, Fukuoka...