News

A couple of parts of the traditional English landscape changed significantly this week. Not only did the country's much-maligned cricket team--eventually and after much anxiety--regain The Ashes (a sporting trophy the origin of which, like the game itself, perpetually confounds brief description), but there is now an unfamiliar presence on news stands each morning. The Guardian, the venerable...

In a move that could deal a blow to MSNBC, Microsoft is in talks with Time Warner's America Online to join forces against the might of Yahoo! and Google. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is negotiating a possible stake in AOL as part of a broader deal that would place Microsoft's search technology on AOL.com and tie up their ad sales networks. Such a deal could give the two companies a big...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. is making some of the features on its Internet division site, MSN, available to outside software developers as it takes on Google Inc. in the Web-based information and services market. Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, is encouraging software developers to write programs that tap into MSN, hoping such programs will increase the number of...

Nearly five years after five major television organisations agreed on a policy to keep journalists safer, journalists are being killed in ever-increasing numbers. Among the latest was Waleed Khaled, 35, a Reuters Television soundman who was killed Aug. 28 in Baghdad, and Steven Vincent, an American freelancer in Iraq who was shot to death in Basra Aug. 3. Around the world, more journalists and...

NEW YORK (AP) - Anticipating that the Hurricane Katrina recovery will be a big story for months to come, both NBC and CNN said Thursday they are opening full-time news bureaus in New Orleans. NBC News said its bureau will operate out of space at WDSU-TV, its local affiliate, and will help the network and MSNBC originate shows in the city. Brian Williams anchored the "NBC Nightly News" from there...

Readers and commentators from abroad are watching images of chaos and despair in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and are wondering how a country so mighty could have fallen so far. "Nature Lays a Superpower Low" reads the headline of an editorial in The Hindu, a daily in Chennai. Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, commenting in another article in the paper, writes that Katrina exposed "squalor that would...

Personally, I'm not very fond of the American media. On the one hand, there are the frivolous, superficial television news shows, with their low standards of newsworthiness and their Hollywood-driven agenda, which forces interviewees to compress complex messages into five-second sound bites. American newspapers, on the other hand, take themselves too seriously: grey, unwieldy and laboriously...

HUMAROCK, Massachusetts (Hollywood Reporter) - Will Katrina and its grim aftermath spell an end to some of the excesses in TV hurricane reporting? Let's hope so. In the case of most hurricanes, the coverage has two- or three-day arcs: preparation in the path of the storm, surf, rain and wind during the storm itself, then a day or so showing the destruction and human toll. Katrina, we know now...

SEARCH GIANT GOOGLE WEDNESDAY LAUNCHED a search engine exclusively for blogs, entering a market that has thus far been dominated by niche search engines like Technorati.com, BlogPulse.com, Feedster.com, and IceRocket.com. The feature, located at BlogSearch.Google.com, is still in beta testing. As of yet, there are no keyword-related ads alongside the natural search results. Google announced the...

NEW YORK -- A journalists' group said Wednesday that the U.S. military hasn't fully investigated the killing of members of the media by American troops in Iraq. Some 13 journalists have been killed by U.S. troops since the war began in March 2003, according to a study released Wednesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 40 other journalists have lost their lives covering the...