2005-2014

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – EU foreign ministers on Monday (27 February) changed the wording of a statement on the Danish cartoon row at the insistence of Dutch foreign minister Bernard Bot, who wanted to avoid the suggestion of an EU apology towards the Muslim world. Meeting in Brussels, the ministers issued a fresh statement on the violence that recently erupted in some muslim countries following...

The Oulu-based Finnish cultural magazine Kaltio fired its editor Jussi Vilkuna after he refused to remove a cartoon on its website featuring Prophet Muhammad wearing a mask and discussing freedom of speech with a cartoonist. The controversial cartoon has since been removed from the magazine's website. After the posting of the cartoon, many permanent advertisers including the Finnish insurance...

Volgograd, February 27, Interfax - The first issue of a newspaper, which is to replace the closed Gorodskiye Vesti, will be released in Volgograd on Tuesday. Gorodskiye Vesti was closed for publishing a religious cartoon. The lower Volga department of the federal service monitoring media compliance with the law and protecting cultural heritage registered the new paper, Volgogradskaya Gazeta, on...

THE number of media owners serving the Sydney market could be more than halved under an expected plan to change the cross media rules that is about to be made public. New ownership data from the Australian Communications and Media Authority and analysis by the Australian Parliamentary Library shows the number of media owners in the Sydney market could fall from 12 to five, a 58 per cent reduction...

The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned the Malaysian government's suspension for two weeks of the publishing permit of the Chinese-language Berita Petang Sarawak newspaper for reprinting controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The cartoons accompanied a February 4 article headlined, "We are prepared for the jihad war," the official government news agency Bernama said in...

Chief Russian media figures have made an open statement against the closure of a newspaper that had published a picture of Jesus Christ, Moses, Buddha and Mohammed. Administration members of MediaSoyuz, the union of Russian journalists, have said in their statement published by Vremya Novostei newspaper on Sunday that the situation should be considered "in the sphere of journalist ethics...

SHANGHAI, China -- A Web-surfing Chinese professor was nonplussed to find personal attacks against him posted on a blog. So when the operators of the hosting Web site refused to remove the offending language, he decided to sue them for harm to his reputation, in what Chinese media on Thursday called the first such case to come before the country's courts. Web site Blogcn.com had told Nanjing...

Maybe you've heard: Blogs are a vanishing fad -- this year's digital Pet Rock. Or a business bubble about to pop. Or a sucker's bet for new-media fame seekers. Recent weeks have seen the rise of a cottage industry in Whither Blogging? articles. New York magazine cast cold water on newly minted bloggers' dreams with an examination of the divide between a handful of A-list blogs and countless B-list...

SAN FRANCISCO – After spending the last decade building its brand around a cartoon character named Jeeves, Ask.com wants everyone to forget the dainty butler and remember its long-overlooked Internet search engine as the next best thing to Google. To make its point, Ask.com is jettisoning Jeeves as its corporate mascot on Monday and unveiling a retooled website that's designed to make it easier to...

The Guardian and Rzeczpospolita have been named the World's Best-Designed Newspapers at the 27th annual The Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition of the Society for News Design (SND). Meeting at Syracuse University in New York, five judges reviewed 389 newspapers from 44 countries to decide the 2005 winners. "Many newspapers achieved a high standard of overall design, photography and...