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UK media policy is dominated by a cosy cartel of politicians, government advisers and industry lobbyists, according to new research. Despite government assertions that media policy is increasingly transparent, the report argues that it is centralised, opaque and controlled by a small number of advisers and media experts. Based on interviews with 40 leading media policy-makers, the research...

NEW YORK -- asap is here. The Associated Press has launched its younger audience service in a bid to attract the 18-to-34-year-old demographic group to AP's members and subscribers. AP today began delivering online and print content to members and subscribers who have signed up for the premium service. asap content, which includes words, pictures, sounds, moving images, blogs and interactive...

Politicians who deliberately leak confidential information to the press get away with it most of the time, a study has revealed. Researchers at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands spoke to journalists and editors at 50 Dutch daily newspapers and found that not one believed using leaked information posed a moral problem. According to the survey, leaked information was generally published...

Google is planning a partner forum for about 400 people, including bloggers and journalists from major media outlets, and is prohibiting participants from writing about it, according to a search engine industry expert. Dubbed "Zeitgeist '05: The Google Partner Forum," the event is "the first 'customer innovation conference' Google said it has ever held," wrote Danny Sullivan in his Search Engine...

Good morning TimesSelect seems to say Steve Outing in a recent column of Editor & Publisher. Regarding the new paid service from The New York Times providing exclusive online access to Op-Ed columnists, the NYT archives and some web tools, he considers that "the hybrid online publishing model is a good one (keep most of the news Web site free, but build a suite of premium services worth paying for...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the global organisation representing more than 500,000 journalists in over 110 countries, is alarmed by the arrest of more than 80 journalists at a protest in Kathmandu and the exodus of journalists from Dailekh district, fearing for their lives. "Press freedom and respect for the rights of journalists in Nepal are being shot to pieces by a...

NEW YORK: Newspapers, it seems, have a knack for getting people what they want. According to a new study released by Newspaper Services of America and co-funded by the Newspaper Association of America, 60% of respondents said that newspapers deal with issues they care about. That beat out TV, radio, magazines, and the Internet. Newspapers also deliver the most comprehensive source of news, said 46...

Hundreds of thousands of people looking for the latest news on Hurricane Katrina went to New Orleans' local media last month to get the latest on the storm's devastation, a web metrics firm said Monday. Nola.com, the web home of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper owned by Advance Publications, saw its traffic soar 277 percent from July to 1.7 million visitors in August, ComScore Networks...

The Irish Independent and The Limpopo Mirror newspaper in South Africa were jointly awarded the World Young Reader Prize by the World Association of Newspapers during a ceremony Monday in Buenos Aires, Argentina. La Prensa of Panama received a Jury Commendation from the Paris-based WAN. Special Mention awards went to The Hindustan Times in India and to The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey in the...

BEIJING, (AFP) - News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch has accused authorities in Beijing of being paranoid after admitting plans to develop his empire in China have "hit a brick wall", the Financial Times reported. Murdoch said Chinese authorities were no longer opening up theier vast untapped market to international media companies, reversing their stance from a year ago. The newspaper said Murdoch...