News

8 December 2005 -- Kazakh authorities today seized the entire print run of the latest issue of an opposition newspaper. In early November, all copies of "Juma Times" were seized for what authorities said was "deliberately false" information that harmed the reputation of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev. Editors at the paper say they were given no official reason for the latest seizure. The...

BISHKEK, 7 December (IRIN) - Eight months after public protests swept away Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev, press freedom remains a key issue in the former Soviet republic, despite expectations that the new authorities would promote media liberalisation, journalists say. A recent month-long dispute between the staff and shareholders of KOORT - the first national independent television channel in...

London (ENI). When a reader wrote to Britain's daily Guardian newspaper complaining there were too many religious stories in a journal, she believed had a secular tradition, the readers' editor decided to make an electronic check. "Yet another religious article today," the reader wrote on 5 December. "Please could you tell me why there is now so much religion in the Guardian? What prompted this...

THERE was plenty of hand- wringing by newspaper executives about the future of their industry yesterday at the UBS Global Media Conference in Midtown Manhattan. In the last year, newspapers have cut jobs, their circulation has fallen and readers have continued to drift to the Internet and other nontraditional media. But some of those executives saw promising news amid the gloom and doom. November...

Thousands of people flooded the streets of Iran's capital Tehran to mourn the death of the victims of the military aircraft which crashed on Tuesday in the capital, killing 116 people, including 68 journalists, and injuring dozens of others. The families of the victims have blamed the crash on poor safety procedures. The aircraft was carrying journalists, photographers and cameramen to cover...

WASHINGTON – Aaron Klein, WND's Jerusalem bureau chief, was prevented today from entering Syria, where he planned to interview officials from Syria, Lebanon and the U.S., as well as co-host ABC Radio's nationally syndicated "The John Batchelor Show," because, according to at least one official in the Syrian embassy, he's Jewish. Klein, an American citizen whose family has resided in the United...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Newspaper publishers predicted modest growth for next year at a pair of investor conferences Wednesday, as rising costs and a volatile advertising environment continue to cloud their prospects. However, companies like Gannett Co. and Belo Corp. that also own television stations said they expected to see benefits from the Winter Olympics and the upcoming elections next fall...

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Expect a somber mood Wednesday at the UBS Global Media Conference in New York City: It is newspaper day. At a confab sprinkled with presentations from executives at cable networks (like Time Warner Cable), advertising agencies (example: Universal McCann), satellite concerns (BSkyB and XM Satellite Radio) and technology hardware providers that make all this media possible...

It's come to this: A single wealthy investor is able to threaten the civic vitality of 32 American metropolitan areas by forcing the sale of their newspapers to new owners in order to satisfy his demand for larger profits. Because those higher returns almost certainly will come at the expense of investigative reporting, independence from advertisers and adequately staffed and skilled newsrooms...

Wikipedia, the open source online encyclopaedia, is to become a little less open - and, perhaps, a little better sourced - after a bruising encounter with a retired newspaper editor. The website that has spawned some 850,000 articles in English alone since its creation in 2001 has been forced to tighten up its submission rules to prevent unregistered users dipping in and adding complete rubbish...