News

When search giant Google asked for $85 per share in its initial public offering on Aug. 19, 2004, more than a few people thought its wunderkind founders had perhaps drunk a bit too much of their own Kool-Aid. Fifteen months later, it looks like, if anything, they underestimated investors' enthusiasm for their fast-growing company. Google's stock price continued its upward march Monday, finishing...

Suppose your industry controlled 11 of the top 25 news and information websites, and was the dominant online information source in most of the country's biggest 75 markets. You drew nearly a third of all U.S. Internet users. Of your online customers 44 percent were younger than 34 and earned over $50,000. Your Internet audience -- alongside the 75 million adults who buy your off-line output every...

Al Jazeera International, the English language news channel to be launched from Qatar early next year, wants to break even within five years. But Nigel Parsons, managing director at the channel, admitted that while the station had secured advertising from day one, it could take many more years to reach the black. He said: "We are looking to create a significant revenue stream and we’d love to...

On November 22, Britain's Daily Mirror published a startling allegation: In an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush proposed bombing the Arab TV network Al Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. The report was based on a memo stamped "Top Secret" that had been leaked by a Cabinet official in Blair's government. Is the allegation "outlandish...

NEW YORK: For years, publishers have relied -- often to their detriment -- upon the metric of paid circulation. But circulation for the core product has been on a long, steady decline, causing some to suggest that print is on its way out. The industry has touted the notion of readership -- a metric that takes into account how many people read the paper whether they buy it or not -- for years, but...

Early on in Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward’s surprisingly useful if analytically inane account of the inner machinations behind the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, Mr. Woodward supplies a little forensic digression on the White House, message discipline and the meaning of the phrase "senior administration officials." "A news story with that attribution," he wrote, "often carries a...

Nepal police stormed a community FM radio station, arrested four journalists and seized equipment in order to block a BBC interview with Maoist leader Prachanda late Sunday. "The legal action has been against Radio Sagarmatha as it has been found that topics prohibited or banned has been broadcast," state-run Radio Nepal quoted a statement by the Nepal information and communications ministry as...

It was a cinematic image that lured thousands of young people into journalism, Robert Redford coaxing information out of Hal Holbrook in a dimly lit parking garage. And since, in real life, Bob Woodward fiercely protected Deep Throat's identity, what lingered was the mystique of a dogged journalist, plying his trade in the shadows. Three decades older and millions of dollars richer, Woodward still...

When Lord Goldsmith, the British attorney general, pounced on the Daily Mirror tabloid newspaper last week, threatening it and the rest of the media with the nation's Official Secrets Act, he was accused of imposing censorship to save prime minister Tony Blair, and his master George W Bush, from embarrassment. This was likely the intention, but the result could become not a savior, but the...

If only Bob Woodward had used his inside sources for good instead of evil. Of course, he did just that in exposing the evils of the Nixon administration, but the revelation that the Washington Post journalist had concealed for 17 months the fact that a White House official had leaked former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity to him has dulled the luster of this icon of investigative reporting...