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NEWS Corp's satellite television arm, DirecTV, could spend up to $US1 billion ($1.335 billion) to enter the wireless high-speed internet market, Rupert Murdoch told analysts on Monday. The 74-year-old left analysts at Citigroup's global media conference in no doubt that he is staking News Corp's future growth on the internet. In the past six months the company has spent $US1.3 billion picking up...

A journalist with an Assamese daily has been murdered allegedly at the behest of a forest warden he had criticised in several articles. According to the Assam Tribune, Prahlad Goala, the Golaghat correspondent of the Asomiya Khabar, was brutally murdered on the night of January 6 at Thuramukh near Nambar Reserve Forest. Goala is the first journalist to be killed anywhere in the world in 2006...

Local TV station Web sites, which have lagged behind competitors during the current Internet advertising boom, are poised to make significant strides over the next decade, particularly given their strength in delivering online video content. That's according to a new Television Bureau of Advertising survey conducted by Borrell Associates, "Benchmarking the Local Website Marketplace," which found...

Last fall, students at the University of South Florida contributed to Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, by writing entries for numpty, mohoger, japsoc, and gavilan. The definitions they gave were foggy (numpty, "tea from the land of nump"; gavilan, "a species of left-wing American focused solely on doom and gloom"). Their English professor, Alex Duensing, encouraged them to dream up more...

International press freedom organisations have expressed alarm at the abduction of American journalist Jill Carroll in Baghdad, and the murder of her interpreter. Carroll, a freelancer on assignment in Iraq for the Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped on January 7 by unidentified gunmen in the Adil neighborhood of western Baghdad with her interpreter, Allan Enwiyah. KIDNAPPED AND KILLED...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has voiced outrage at the continuing harassment of the independent press by the security forces in both Kathmandu and the districts, in which at least six journalists have been detained, attacked or threatened already this year. DOWN WITH THE KING: Supporters of the Nepal Workers and Peasant Party take part in a massive rally against the monarchy in the capital...

Of all the statements that officers or representatives of a company should never say to the media, the "No comment" answer tops the list. This, according to Guam Business and Marianas Business Journal publisher Maureen N. Maratita during a brief presentation at the first Saipan Rotary Club meeting for 2006 at the Hyatt Regency Saipan. Maratita provided the Rotarians the Top 10 statements that...

MSPs have ordered a report into the state of Scotland's media following a swathe of job losses at the end of last year. Scottish Parliament researchers will look across television, newspaper and radio activity in Scotland over the next few weeks. Their report, expected in February or March, could then trigger a series of fresh hearings with media owners called to give evidence. Last month it...

Google has suggested it may consider setting up an online book store. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that this would depend on permission from copyright holders. The web giant has been electronically scanning thousands of volumes and has put some online. But its plans to create an index to all the world's books have run into opposition from...

Security attacks over instant-messaging networks became more prevalent in 2005, according to a new study. Microsoft's MSN network experienced the largest number of IM security incidents in both 2004 and 2005, while year-on-year incident growth rates were largest on AOL's AIM network, according to the report, published Monday by IM security vendor FaceTime Communications. In 2005, MSN had a 57...