News

Jim Chisholm, Strategy Advisor for WAN and Director of the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project ( www.futureofthenewspaper.com) says newspapers have much to look forward to in 2006. Here are his forecasts for the year. By any measure the media industry is undergoing extraordinary change. Consider for a minute that MSN, Playstations, Amazon, and eBay didn’t exist in 1994. Google was launched...

As Father Time faded into history with the end of 2005, he was spinning out of control. Over the past twelve months, the ideal of accurate, accountable, civic-minded news media faced nearly constant attack. Fake news abounded, from Pentagon-planted stories in Iraqi newspapers to corporate- and government-funded video news releases aired by U.S. newsrooms. Enough payola pundits surfaced to...

"The Way to Read Newspapers to Train the Brain," by Professor Ryuta Kawashima at Tohoku University, says "a newspaper is the best tool to train the brain." Professor Kawashima is one of the top authorities in the research of the brain and its functions, and has released over 10 books alone in this field. In this book, Kawashima says that the most important part of the brain is the prefrontal...

AMMAN, 3 January (IRIN) - Jordan's press syndicate and newspaper publishers have launched a campaign to lobby lawmakers to speed up ratification of a new press law scrapping provisions setting jail terms for journalists. Independent politicians, media figures and newspaper editors began lobbying lawmakers this week to give priority in the new parliamentary session to approving an amendment...

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish state prosecutors on Monday charged nine people, including a journalist who works for Reuters news agency, with spreading propaganda on behalf of Kurdish separatists. If found guilty the nine, who include other journalists and human rights activists, face up to three years in jail. Turkish national Ferit Demir, a stringer for Reuters based in the eastern town of Tunceli...

BEIJING – An emotional strike by 100 journalists at this city's most popular and lively newspaper follows a 16-month campaign to quash a broad range of "unapproved" public speech in areas verging on politics or society - a campaign that includes Internet blogs, and new restrictions on cellphones designed to smoke outsenders of renegade text messages. In the case of Beijing News, whose progressive...

The police in Lilongwe Monday forced Nation Publications journalist Mabvuto Banda disembark an Ethiopian Airlines plane at Kamuzu International Airport (KIA) as he was about to fly out to London, United Kingdom. According to the police officer who was handling the issue, Jacob Bango, KIA Police just received a message on Sunday from Lilongwe Regional Police Office that Banda should not be allowed...

WASHINGTON (AP) A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the...

NEW YORK: A 32-year-old former Wall Street Journal reporter has joined the U.S. Marines. "When people ask why," Matt Pottinger wrote in a column last month, "I usually have a short answer. It felt like the time had come to stop reporting events and get more directly involved. But that's not the whole answer, and how I got to this point wasn't a straight line." Among other assignments, Pottinger...

MAKING predictions about anything is a fool's errand, which got me wondering why I was put in charge of it this year. But, with a firm grasp of industry trends and a little imagination (plus a Magic 8-Ball, a Ouija Board and a piece of yarn that a cat had spit up), I was able to divine some slam-dunk predictions for the coming year that would make Kreskin weep. Here goes: The 30-Second Spot will...